Stem Cells Treat Early Stage MS

Just another adult stem cell success story:

A dose of their own stem cells “reset” the malfunctioning immune system of patients with early-stage multiple sclerosis and, for the first time, reversed their disability, according to researchers at Northwestern University in Chicago.

All 21 patients in the study had the “relapsing-remitting” form of the disease that makes their symptoms alternately flare up and recede. Three years after being treated, on average, 17 of the patients had improved on tests of their symptoms, 16 had experienced no relapse and none had deteriorated, the study found.

“This is the first study to actually show reversal of disability,” said Richard Burt, an associate professor in the division of immunotherapy at Northwestern, and the lead author of the study published yesterday in the British journal, the Lancet Neurology. “Some people had complete disappearance of all symptoms.”

Researchers are using stem cells taken from people’s own bodies to try to fight conditions such as heart disease, orthopedic ailments and to reconstruct women’s breasts after cancer surgery.

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FDA Approves Human Trial of Treatment Derived From ESCs

The headline: FDA OKs First Human Trials of Embryonic Stem Cells. Note, this treatment will not consist in the direct infusion of human embryonic stem cells, but of neurons derived from ESCs:

Starting this summer, the biotech firm Geron will treat a small group of spinal-cord injury patients using neurons derived from stem cells, marking the first time embryonic stem cells will be tested in humans.

The trial is designed to test the safety of the treatment, not how well it works. Nonetheless, it’s a huge first step for the field…

Working in a handful of medical centers around the country, Geron will treat eight to 10 recent paraplegics, who can use their arms but not their legs. The patients will receive an injection of neurons to the site of the damage, followed by a short treatment of anti-rejection drugs.

Previous animal studies suggest the new neurons will repair damaged neurons and secrete substances to help nerves function and grow.

This kind of treatment may be a way to try to get around the serious complications that have plagued the direct injection of ESCs for decades. But even if the trial succeeds – and we certainly don’t wish any harm on the trial patients – and the treatment is later also proven effective, it remains unethical to use and destroy human life for any kind of medical treatments. Pray that more people understand this.

P.S. What you don’t hear from the above story regarding this first clinical trial with ESCs is that adult stem cells have not only been proven safe, but also effective in multiple clinical trials for human patients with spinal cord injury. Watch video testimony from Jacki Rabon whose spinal cord injury improved after she was injected with stem cells from her own nose in this trial from Portugal that lead to further human trials in several other countries. See more patients treated with ASCs for SCI here, here and here.

Bush Was a Stem Cell Leader

In a recent op-ed for the Washington Times Brian Gillin thanks Pres. Bush for his help in advancing stem cell science – that’s right, advancing it:

Thank you, President Bush, for not allowing science to be divorced from ethics. In 2001, you struck a balance on embryonic stem-cell research, limiting the millions of federal funding toward that field of study to those stem-cell lines already created, from human embryos already destroyed. You also devoted generous amounts of funding to studying adult stem cells which have already treated thousands of actual human patients, and signed an executive order for more study of “alternative” methods of obtaining stem cells. Your opponents mischaracterized your view as “religious,” and reviled your policy as “anti-science” (or, worse, as “anti-cure”), but the positive results speak otherwise.

A little more than a year ago, scientists successfully reprogrammed ordinary adult cells to an embryonic-like state – one of the “alternative” methods you had outlined. Many researchers are now turning away from embryonic research and toward these induced pluripotent cells – for reasons of both ethics and practicality. Your policy did not impede research; it helped it to advance.

Sadly this will not be his legacy in the eyes of many, but it’s the truth. Because of his fidelity to the sanctity of human life and ethics in science, he’s characterized, as Brian says, of being “anti-science” and “setting our country back” in the area of stem cell research when in fact his policies helped bring about one of the biggest breakthroughs in stem cell science to date. A breakthrough that is not only more ethical, but already proving to be more productive than research using human embryos. Meanwhile Congress (not to mention his successor) still insists on pushing to increase funding for stem cell research that, even if it one day overcame its serious complications and cured the deadliest disease known to man (unlikely, to say the least), would be so tainted by its use and destruction of nascent human life that it would not be much of an advancement for science or the world.

See also:
Cloning pioneer Ian Wilmut to pursue non-ESCR
ESCR pioneer James Thompson to pursue non-ESCR

Obama May Not Use Executive Order on Stem Cell Funding

In a recent interview with CNN president Barack Obama indicated that he would rather rely on Congress to rescind Bush’s ESCR funding policy instead of doing it himself by presidential executive order:

“Well, if we can do something legislative then I usually prefer a legislative process because those are the people’s representatives”

This is good news and potentially bad news. The good news is that we have a better opportunity to fight it this way. Not only will we be able to try to encourage our legislators, who we ideally would have more influence over, to oppose any such measure, but a bill would have to go through committee hearings and floor debate where the opposition will have more time to educate and be heard.

The bad news is that this process could result in a more radical pro-ESCR policy. Wesley Smith explains this in a comment on his own post:

There is something called the Dickey Amendment, that prevents federal money to be used in embryo destructive research. Clinton got around it by signing an executive order stating that while fed money wouldn’t go to making the stem cell lines–which involves embryo destruction–AFTER THEY ARE MADE, and if “excess” embryos were used, federal $ could be spent on ESCR. That passed a court test, but then Clinton went out of office before it got started.

Bush rescinded Clinton’s EO, and replaced it with the one that permits funding but only on stem cell lines in creation before 8.9.01. In that way there is no incentive to destroy embryos in anticipation of getting federal money.

Obama has said he will basically go back to the Clinton approach. But once he does that, the fire goes out of the issue.

If, however, he says to Congress, “You deal with it,” a whole new and more radical ball game is in the offing, not just for the ESCR funding policy, but I think perhaps Dickey ITSELF could be at risk because that has to pass each year as part of the budgetary process.

If Dickey is repealed, then fed $ can go to destroy the embryos as well as afterwards–and not just in ESCR, but for other experiments and to fund the creation of embryos for research as well as therapeutic cloning.

This is no guarantee, to be sure, but definitely something to watch out for.

More on Possible Future Stem Cell Trials for AIDS Treatment

Here is a more recent story about something I mentioned a few months ago:

Results of a preliminary trial have raised hopes of a new form of therapy for people suffering from Aids, which occurs in the latter stages of infection with Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). The scientists are planning further research to establish whether the treatment could even rid patients of HIV infection altogether.

The technique involves isolating genes which curb the spread of HIV inside the body, introducing the genes into human stem cells in a laboratory, then transplanting the stem cells into a patient’s bone marrow.

In the first human trial, anti-HIV stem cells were transplanted into five Aids patients undergoing bone marrow replacement as part of treatment for a form of cancer known as lymphoma.

Small quantities of the transplanted stem cells were able to grow and produce new white blood cells resistant to HIV, resulting in an improvement in the patients’ conditions.

Findings from the trial will be presented this week at the Stem Cell World Congress in Palm Springs, California. It could take up to ten years before an effective clinical treatment could be put into widespread use…

They are due to begin a larger trial where patients will be given greater concentrations of the anti-HIV stem cells in a bid to fight off their condition.

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Does advancement in pharmacology really require embryonic stem cell research?

CNN recently spoke with Leiden University Professor of Developmental Biology, Christine Mummery, who is excited about the anticipated Obama effect on science and research, particularly in the area of pharmacology and drug development. Present U.S. policy, which prohibits the use of human embryos in any lab that receives federal funding, is burdonsome, she opines:

“What’s happened in the U.S. is that people have become very frustrated and a lot of private initiatives — like the Harvard Stem Cell Institute — were started up to circumvent the lack of National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding. NIH researchers are either left behind or have a huge administrative burden,” Mummery said.

“You go into a lab in the States and they say; ‘this is our NIH lab, and this is our other lab’. They have to buy one microscope to look at NIH lines and another to look at other lines. They have to administer all the stem cells separately. There are even dotted lines in a lab which you can and cannot cross. It’s completely ridiculous,” she said.

Mummery  hopes the process of drug development will be dramatically expedited once testing on cells from human embryos can replace testing on animals. Some animal welfare advocates are excited about the anticipated promising shift away from research on  live animals. (Never mind the “vivisection” of live human embryos).

Yet, even as Mummery concedes, all these anticipated benefits don’t necessarily require the destruction of human embryos. Progress with IPSC’s should offer human cells and tissue for testing and while this won’t completely eliminate the need for live animal testing, it could minimize it.  Interestingly, back home in the Netherlands at Mummery’s own lab, it is research  with adult stem cells which have made an impact – Stem Cells Train Heart Following Heart Attack, Do we really need tiny, pulsing masses.