Stem Cell Research

As widespread interest in stem cell research increases, so do the number of news articles and reports. It is an unfortunate fact that several misconceptions and distortions have taken hold within the secular media. Ten such “Media Myths” are addressed below.

Myth 1. Stem cells can only come from embryos. In fact stem cells can be taken from umbilical cords, the placenta, amniotic fluid, adult tissues and organs such as bone marrow, fat from liposuction, regions of the nose, and even from cadavers up to 20 hours after death.

Myth 2. Christians are against stem cell research. There are four categories of stem cells: embryonic stem cells, embryonic germ cells, umbilical cord stem cells, and adult stem cells. Given that germ cells can come from miscarriages that involve no deliberate interruption of pregnancy, Christians in general oppose the use of only one of these four categories, i.e., embryonic stem cells. In other words, most Christians approve of three of the four possible types of stem cell research.

Myth 3. Embryonic stem cell research has the greatest promise. Up to now, no human being has ever been cured of a disease using embryonic stem cells. Adult stem cells, on the other hand, have already cured thousands. For example, bone marrow cells from the hipbone have repaired scar tissue on the heart after heart attacks. Research using adult cells is 20-30 years ahead of embryonic stem cells and holds greater promise. This is in part because stem cells are part of the natural repair mechanisms of an adult body, while embryonic stem cells do not belong in an adult body (where they are likely to form tumors, and to be rejected as foreign tissue by the recipient). Rather, embryonic stem cells really belong only within in the specialized microenvironment of a rapidly growing embryo, which is a radically different setting from an adult body.

Myth 4. Embryonic stem cell research is against the law. In reality, there is no law or regulation against destroying human embryos for research purposes. While President Bush has banned the use of federal funding to support research on embryonic stem cell lines created after August 2001, it is not illegal. Anyone using private funds is free to pursue it.

Myth 5. President Bush created new restrictions to federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. The 1996 Dickey Amendment prohibited the use of federal funds for research that would involve the destruction of human embryos. Bush’s decision to permit research on embryonic stem cell lines created before a certain date thus relaxes this restriction from the Clinton era.

Myth 6. Theraputic cloning and reproductive cloning are fundamentally different from each other. The creation of cloned embryos either to make a baby or to harvest cells occurs by the same series of technical steps. The only difference is what will be done with the cloned human embryo that is produced. Will it be given the protection of a woman’s womb in order to be born? Or will it be destroyed for its stem cells?

Myth 7. Somatic nuclear cell transfer is different from cloning. In fact, “somatic cell nuclear transfer” is simply cloning by a different name. The end result is still a cloned embryo.

Myth 8. By doing somatic cell nuclear transfer, we can directly produce tissues or organs without having to clone an embryo. At the present stage of research, scientists are unable to bypass the creation of an embryo in the production of tissues or organs. In the future it may be possible to inject elements from the cytoplasm of a woman’s ovum into a somatic cell to “reprogram” it into a stem cell. This is called “de-differentiation.” If so, there would be no fundamental moral objection to this approach to getting stem cells.

Myth 9. Every body cell, or somatic cell, is somehow an embryo and thus a human life. People sometimes argue: “Every cell in the body has the potential to become an embryo. Does that mean that every time we wash our hands and are shedding thousands of cells, we are killing life?” The problem is that this overlooks the basic biological difference between a regular body cell, and one whose nuclear material has been fused with an unfertilized egg cell, resulting in an embryo. A normal skin cell will only give rise to more skin cells when it divides, while an embryo will give rise to the entire adult organism. Skin cells are not potential adults. Skin cells are potentially only more skin cells. Only embryos are potential adults.

Myth 10. Because frozen embryos may one day end up being discarded by somebody, that makes it allowable, even laudable, to violate and destroy those embryos. The moral analysis of what we may permissibly do with an embryo doesn’t depend on its otherwise “going to waste,” nor on the incidental fact that those embryos are “trapped” in liquid nitrogen. Consider a radical case in which a group of children are permanently trapped in a schoolhouse through no fault of their own; that would not make it morally acceptable to send in a remote control robotic device which would harvest organs from those children and cause their demise.

http://www.ucdenver.edu/about/WhoWeAre/Research/Pages/spinalCordInjuries...

The link above will take you to the University of Colorado Denver, which Stephen Davies shows how he is taking part in spinal cord injuries and stem cell research. Check it out and let me know your thoughts!
There is also a little video/audio to this site that gives you an idea of what its all about for the ones who don’t like reading so much.

Eight patients report improvement after surgery that included infusions of their own bone marrow stem cells

[Editor's note: It's not easy to assess a study's ramifications from press releases, three of which caught my eye this month. I asked Phil Schwartz, a neural stem cell expert at Children's Hospital of Orange County, California, to help me understand the gap between study and therapy. I also asked authors from each paper to respond. This article is one of three resulting from this process.]

Research summary by Nature Reports Stem Cells: Eight people with spinal cord injury received surgeries that included removing scar tissue, untethering the spinal cord and receiving infusions of cells collected from their own bone marrow. Four received the procedures within 40 days of their injuries; four received the procedure more than six years after their injuries. A series of case studies, published in Cell Transplantation, were conducted at the Luis Vernaza General Hospital in Guayaquil, Ecuador, by a team led by Francisco Silva, head of stem cell company DaVinci Biosciences, based in Costa Mesa, California. Patients were assessed for quality of life six months, one year and two years after the study, according to measures of bladder function, mobility and sensation. To avoid bias, the neurologists who conducted the assessments were not the neurologists who recruited the patients for the procedure. Almost all the patients reported some level of improvement on the measures assessed1.

News coverage: Two versions of a press release were sent out. The first, from the journal, was put into a release service for science journalists. I found the second, from DaVinci, through FierceBioResearcher, an industry newsletter, and it is downloadable from DaVinci's website. This release quotes praise for the study from the journal's editor without identifying him as such.

Schwartz's take: It's a very interesting study, but it suffers from a problem that a lot of human clinical trials suffer from: What do you use as an appropriate control for these types of studies? Arguments have been made that doing a sham surgery for a highly invasive procedure is unethical. On the other hand, there are also studies that show patients when they had a sham surgery versus [when patients actually had] the fetal tissue put in the brain2. When the patients thought they had the real thing (that is, the transplant of the fetal tissue) they did better. So the placebo effect is real.

Over and above that, with these particular patients, the researchers do cite references to show that spinal decompression doesn't alter the course of the injury. But the manipulations they did were over and above spinal decompression. There were a number of manipulations they did — including untethering the spinal cord and removing scar tissue — and none of them were controlled for. So a basic question is: To what extent does just untethering the scarred spinal cord or removing glial scar tissue have a significant beneficial effect?

It's been shown in animal models that scar tissue does prevent axons from growing across the injured site. So although they've shown that putting the cells in is feasible and safe, they have not shown that it has any kind of efficacy, and they don't have proper controls to do so.

Author reply:

Nature Reports Stem Cells (NRSC): Before DaVinci, you were an executive at another stem cell company, PrimeGen [in Irvine, California], which has issued press releases of advances described as extremely promising but without publishing the results in peer-reviewed journals. Do you think this is appropriate?

Silva: It is obvious that when they released their claims in 2008 [they were] not well received. PrimeGen Biotech had a corporate strategy regarding publishing their work, which differed from my belief that peer review is a required and needed process providing validation and transparency. As a result, I left [the company] in 2007.

NRSC: Why are there two versions of the press release? Why did the longer one quote Paul Sanberg praising your study without identifying him as the editor of the journal in which [the study] was published? Do you think readers will understand that Sean Morrison's quote refers to a study other than your own?

Silva: There are two versions of the press release because one was issued independently by Cell Transplantation and the other was issued by DaVinci Biosciences. Paul Sanberg was asked to comment on the study based on his expertise in neuroscience. If you read the press release, [it states,] "Up to 400,000 people in the United States are estimated to live with spinal cord injuries, according to the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation. On January 23, 2009, The Food and Drug Administration approved the first U.S. clinical trial to use human embryonic stem cells in paralyzed humans. In a recent ABC News story on this FDA approval, Dr. Sean Morrison, director at the University of Michigan Center for Stem Cell Biology was cited as saying that even if this study could restore partial spinal cord function or bladder function that it would be a really important advancement."

It clearly states that the quote is relating to the FDA-approved ESC [embryonic stem cell] trial.

NRSC: How can you be sure that your observations [in the paper] reflect the administration of cells rather than improvement over time or other effects of the procedure?

Silva: The end points of this study were to determine if the surgical procedure and injection of autologous bone marrow stem cells into the site of injury via multiple routes were safe and feasible. The only way to truly determine this would be to include a control group; since this study did not have an end point to determine efficacy, it would have been inappropriate to have a control group and expose the patients to a surgical procedure where safety had not yet been determined. In our preclinical work that we performed using a spinal cord injury animal model, we did find that our control group — which did not receive cells — had no functional improvement.

[Editor's note: I sent the following follow-up question but had received no reply after two days, when this article went to web production:

Can you tell me more about the animal testing of autologous bone-marrow in spinal cord injury? (I reread what I thought would be the relevant section of your paper, and the only reference was Keirstead's work on hES-derived oligodendrocyte cells. What am I missing?)]

NRSC: Did any patients pay for the procedure? What was the cost?

Silva: None of the patients paid for this procedure; the study was funded 100% by a grant from the Junta de Beneficencia de Guayaquil, a nonprofit organization in Ecuador.

NRSC: Have you done any animal or other testing on how many bone marrow cells stay in or survive in the spinal cord?

Silva: Before initiating this trial, extensive animal testing was performed in order to determine the feasibility of using autologous bone marrow [cells] for spinal cord injuries. What is interesting is that we found that survival and engraftment were more efficient in acute injuries versus chronic injuries.

NRSC: What population of cells from the bone marrow do you think is active?

Silva: Our bone marrow preparation contains several cell types that have been found to have therapeutic potential; in particular we are studying the role of endothelial progenitor cells and their role in neovascularization.

NRSC: What do you think the bone marrow cells do in the spinal cord?

Silva: It has been well documented that cells found within the bone marrow population have angiogenic properties resulting in neovascularization and triggering a cascade of events leading to endogenous repair. The human body has an amazing mechanism to repair itself after stress or injury — using stem cells is complimentary to this and may help jump-start the repair process.

NRSC: What are you doing to try to figure out how the cells might be working?

Silva: We are continuing to work on our spinal cord injury animal models using labelled cells to determine their course of action and mechanism.

We have been working toward filing an IND [investigational new drug application] with the FDA to initiate a multicentre trial in the United States. Having completed our strategic milestone of completing and publishing this safety and feasibility study, we believe that it will bring us closer to an FDA-approved study performed within the United States.
http://www.nature.com/stemcells/2009/0904/090409/full/stemcells.2009.57....

Stem Cell Treatment Heals Spinal Cord Injuries In Mice.

Not a matter to ignore or to weigh in light scales. Any serious injury to the spines can lead to permanent damage. The motor functions of various body parts becomes irrecoverable.

But relax! Scientists are struggling hard to obtain a fruitful solution to the problem.In fact partial success has been achieved.

A team of researchers at Keio University has succeeded in improving spinal cord damage in mice by transplanting into them neural stem cells produced with human induced pluripotent stem cells.

This transplantation is noteworthy because this is the first time in which human iPS cells have been used. The iPS cells are known to get converted into other types of body cells.

This study result is expected to pave the way for treatment of human beings with similar kind of injuries.

www.arbiteronline.com (source)

Personally when i read this article at (http://stemcell.taragana.net/category/spinal-injury/) i got a little excited about the situation. It is something that will take time and in hope of this to keep funds continuing. And one day be able to help the people in need. Technology is amazing anymore, impressed!

With the increasing number of research programs focusing on stem cell research and their application to brain injury and spinal cord injury, today’s facts will help you understand why they are so useful.

Stem cells are basically blank cells that, in most cases, have the ability to become a variety of other cells. They are found in bone marrow, blood, the brain, skeletal muscle, fat and even the skin. While the main controversy exists over embryonic stem cells as they have the ability to become just about any cell, we are still able to utilize adult stem cells in a handful of useful ways.

The idea is that scientists can, with the right research, learn to program stem cells to become new spinal cord tissue or new brain tissue, repairing damage that right now, is irreversible. With more studies coming to light regarding the useful application of adult stem cells, we will hopefully see a day when researchers and anti-stem cell research advocates can find a common ground. In the meantime, keep reading. New applications are being discovered all the time!

The work is by Konstantinos Meletis, a postdoctoral fellow at the Picower Institute, and colleagues at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. Their results could lead to drugs that might restore some degree of mobility to the 30,000 people worldwide afflicted each year with spinal-cord injuries.

In a developing embryo, stem cells differentiate into all the specialized tissues of the body. In adults, stem cells act as a repair system, replenishing specialized cells, but also maintaining the normal turnover of regenerative organs such as blood, skin or intestinal tissues.

The tiny number of stem cells in the adult spinal cord proliferate slowly or rarely, and fail to promote regeneration on their own. But recent experiments show that these same cells, grown in the lab and returned to the injury site, can restore some function in paralyzed rodents and primates.

The researchers at MIT and the Karolinska Institute found that neural stem cells in the adult spinal cord are limited to a layer of cube- or column-shaped, cilia-covered cells called ependymal cells. These cells make up the thin membrane lining the inner-brain ventricles and the connecting central column of the spinal cord.

"We have been able to genetically mark this neural stem cell population and then follow their behavior," Meletis said. "We find that these cells proliferate upon spinal cord injury, migrate toward the injury site and differentiate over several months."

The study uncovers the molecular mechanism underlying the tantalizing results of the rodent and primate and goes one step further: By identifying for the first time where this subpopulation of cells is found, they pave a path toward manipulating them with drugs to boost their inborn ability to repair damaged nerve cells.

"The ependymal cells' ability to turn into several different cell types upon injury makes them very interesting from an intervention aspect: Imagine if we could regulate the behavior of this stem cell population to repair damaged nerve cells," Meletis said.

Upon injury, ependymal cells proliferate and migrate to the injured area, producing a mass of scar-forming cells, plus fewer cells called oligodendrocytes. The oligodendrocytes restore the myelin, or coating, on nerve cells' long, slender, electrical impulse-carrying projections called axons. Myelin is like the layer of plastic insulation on an electrical wire; without it, nerve cells don't function properly.

"The limited functional recovery typically associated with central nervous system injuries is in part due to the failure of severed axons to regrow and reconnect with their target cells in the peripheral nervous system that extends to our arms, hands, legs and feet," Meletis said. "The function of axons that remain intact after injury in humans is often compromised without insulating sheaths of myelin."

If scientists could genetically manipulate ependymal cells to produce more myelin and less scar tissue after a spinal cord injury, they could potentially avoid or reverse many of the debilitating effects of this type of injury, the researchers said.

article found at:
(http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/07/080721223346.htm)