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Friday, Aug. 10, 2001

"It's a step in the right direction," said Dr. David Warburton, a physician and researcher at Children's Hospital LA Research Center in Los Angeles. But for researchers to make significant advances, he said, they would have to "take the brakes off" and "new stem cell lines would have to be developed."

Bush said he would allow federal funding only on research of cell lines that already had resulted in the destruction of an embryo during creation. The issue of killing an embryo is key to opponents of such research.

Bush said he would not support funding to create new stem cell lines from embryos that would be viable as human life, such as frozen embryos in storage at fertilization clinics, or the creation of embryos specifically for research.

On the other side is Dr. David Prentice, a founder of Do No Harm, which opposes embryonic stem cell research, and a professor at Indiana State University at Terre Haute. Do No Harm is made up of scientists and researchers who support adult and animal stem cells studies.

"I think in one sense we're disappointed," Prentice said. "We'll still be harvesting the fruits of embryonic destruction."

Dr. Ole Isacson, an associate professor of neurology at Harvard, told UPI that stem cell research was the "hottest biological research area in the world right now," and without federal funding it would "prevent research from being openly discussed, basically going underground."

He said he did not believe the rationale that embryonic stem cells require the death of the embryo. "That is a fallacy from point one all the way forward," Isacson said. "Human stem cells don't necessarily involve any destructive act."

Isacson said it would take a long time and be difficult, but theoretically the cells can be extracted without harming the embryo.

While Bush said there were 60 stem cell lines, Warburton and others were skeptical the number was correct and were concerned about who had control over the cell lines.

Professor Glenn McGee, of Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, said the patent on the cell lines was held exclusively by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which is in the home state of Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson, who was governor there for 14 years.

"There will be a monopoly on this early research," McGee told reporters. "It will have consequences financially in the short term."

McGee said it would be important early to know how much money the National Institutes of Health, which will oversee funding research projects, will allow to go toward payment of royalties.

Professor Art Caplan, also of Center for Bioethics, said many scientists would be unhappy about going to that cell line source for their research. "It's going to set off a heated debate," Caplan said. "There are going to be issues about what's called 'reach through.'"

He said if researchers come up with useful therapies they likely would have to pay some sort of fee to the owner.

Stem cell research in animals and on adult stem cells has been going on for years. The controversy began in 1998 after James Thomson, a biologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, became the first to sustainably culture human embryonic stem cells. His research was funded privately through Geron Corp., of Menlo Park, Calif.

Stem cells are non-specialized cells that differentiate into specific cells. Adult stem cells, which are rare, are taken from mature tissue, can renew themselves but appear to be more limited in their ability to differentiate into specialized cell types other than that of the tissue from which they were taken.

Embryonic stem cells, however, seem to be able to differentiate into a wide variety of specialized cell types throughout the body, such as heart or pancreatic cells. Researchers, backed up by a recent National Institutes of Health report, believe more research is needed into both types of stem cells, but they are more optimistic about the ability of embryonic cells to develop into medical treatments for disease.

Alan J. Russell, Ph.D., director of McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, told UPI that paralysis and Parkinson's disease could see embryonic stem cell treatments down the road.

"There is a lot of hope and a lot of hype," Russell said. "The bad news is we're still 20 years away from any major impact. The good news is we're 20 years away."

Stem cells also look promising for treatments for diabetes, leukemia, brain diseases and damage caused by heart attacks. "It's definitely not pie in the sky," Warburton said. "It's essential to making spare parts for humans with diseases."

Dr. Harold Varmis, former director of the National Institutes of Health and chairman of the Commission on Stem Cell Research when Bill Clinton was president, said researchers still must find out more about how to grow stem cells in the most efficient manner so they could differentiate. They also must develop a formula for making cells efficiently develop into cell types.

Varmis said researchers were finding the "signaling pathway is extremely complicated" as they try to figure out what is involved in making a stem cell become, for example, a pancreatic cell.

The cells must be delivered so they function properly, Varmis said, creating transplantation issues, as well requirements for many types of different cell lines to treat patients with different tissue antigens to avoid rejection.

Varmis said it would be "foolhardy" to try to estimate a set time frame for development of therapies. He loosely predicted within 10 years some type of embryonic stem cell therapies for important diseases. He said there was potential for adult stem cell therapy, but much more needed to be known about how adult stem cells differentiate.

R. Douglas Armstrong, president and chief executive officer of Ann Arbor, Mich.-based Aastrom Biosciences Inc., said adult stem cell research had been going on for more than a decade and his company had been pursuing clinical trials for the past four years. He said a number of his company's studies have been federally funded.

"There's been support for stem cell research for years," Armstrong told UPI. Bush said this year $250 million would be spent.

Prentice said one problem could be dividing the money between adult and embryonic studies.

Adult stem cells treatments continue to be developed to treat cancer, including brain, testicular and breast tumors, stroke, leukemia, auto-immune system diseases and osteoporosis. Prentice said most bone marrow transplants now were stem cell transplants but much remained in the clinical trial stage.

Aastrom's clinical trials use adult bone marrow and umbilical cord blood, both of which contain stem cells that appear to have some ability to repopulate themselves and to form multiple types of tissue. Armstrong said bone marrow and cord blood stem cells have been able to restore normal blood, immune and marrow systems in some cancer patients.

Copyright 2001 by United Press International. All rights reserved.

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