Stem Cell Progress Report on CNN
Wednesday, August 02, 2006 - Stem Cell Guru
Yesterday, CNN featured a lengthy article on the work of stem cell researchers and looked into what the future holds as far as readily available treatments go.
To its advocates stem cell therapies promise a medical revolution that will enable all of us to live longer, healthier lives.
But to its critics embryonic stem cell research threatens to undermine what it means to be human. The debate may already be under way, but the likely clinical benefits of stem cell research are at least a decade away, according to scientists.
Professor Colin McGuckin, a specialist in regenerative medicine at the UK's Newcastle University, said the prospect of imminent treatments for conditions affecting the nervous system such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease had been exaggerated.But he said stem cell therapies for degenerative disorders afflicting major organs such as the heart and liver could be available within 10 years.
"What we're going to see is one or two patients being helped in some way and people are going to hail it as the end of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's," McGuckin told CNN. "But it's going to be a slow process. We hear an awful lot of hype about what stem cells can do but in reality there's still a lot of work to do."
Dr. Stephen Minger, Director of the Stem Cell Biology Laboratory at King's College in London, said existing cell therapy treatments for diseases such as Parkinson's and diabetes already provided a model for possible stem cell therapies. Dr. Minger added:
"The main body of stem cell research is people working on embryonic stem cells, adult stem cells or cord blood and all of us are trying to find out the best way to use these cells for clinical applications."
To its advocates stem cell therapies promise a medical revolution that will enable all of us to live longer, healthier lives.
But to its critics embryonic stem cell research threatens to undermine what it means to be human. The debate may already be under way, but the likely clinical benefits of stem cell research are at least a decade away, according to scientists.
Professor Colin McGuckin, a specialist in regenerative medicine at the UK's Newcastle University, said the prospect of imminent treatments for conditions affecting the nervous system such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease had been exaggerated.But he said stem cell therapies for degenerative disorders afflicting major organs such as the heart and liver could be available within 10 years.
"What we're going to see is one or two patients being helped in some way and people are going to hail it as the end of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's," McGuckin told CNN. "But it's going to be a slow process. We hear an awful lot of hype about what stem cells can do but in reality there's still a lot of work to do."
Dr. Stephen Minger, Director of the Stem Cell Biology Laboratory at King's College in London, said existing cell therapy treatments for diseases such as Parkinson's and diabetes already provided a model for possible stem cell therapies. Dr. Minger added:
"The main body of stem cell research is people working on embryonic stem cells, adult stem cells or cord blood and all of us are trying to find out the best way to use these cells for clinical applications."
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The conventional wisdom would lead you to believe that embryonic stem cell research is the most likely to lead to the development of a human pluripotent stem cell. But what if you knew it had already been done. . .in humans. . .with a non-embryonic cell?
It has.
PrimeCell Therapeutics in Irvine, Calif. did it this spring. The company has taken stem cells from adult males and reprogrammed those cells to pluripotency, and then reprogrammed them again to grow bone, cartilage, brain and heart cells.
What if pluripotent stem cells were available --- without the ethical problems of working with embryos, and also without the other scientific problems as well?
They can be.
In the fall of 2005, researchers found stem cells in mice and reprogrammed them to become fully pluripotent, and successfully reprogrammed them again to differentiate them into many different types of specific cells from all three germ lines. They’ve done that without the scientific problem of developing teratomas (tumors) that embryonic stem cells have.
And because the cells come from your own body, there are no rejection problems or risk of inheriting genetic defects as would occur with embryonic stem cells.
But what if this model was scientifically confirmed already? The answer is that it has been confirmed by a group of academic researchers in Germany this spring.
However, as we all know, we aren’t really interested in curing mice of their problems. We want to help people. That’s the hope being promised by the supporters of embryonic stem cell research.
But what if we could create fully pluripotent stem cells from non-embryonic cells in humans without the risk of rejection problems? Would everyone still want to spend a lot of time, money and resources trying to find a way to do the very same thing with embryonic stem cells? Probably not. People would want to focus on the technology with the most promise of achieving the goal of helping people the quickest.
Forbes.com recently published an article about this breakthrough technology.
(http://www.forbes.com/home/technology/2006/07/21/stem-cell-research-cz_kd_0721stemcell.html)
The promise of the future is here today.
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