Officials at the Vatican announced on Friday they will begin financing research into the medical use of adult stem cells.
The Vatican has already committed $2.7 million for the research, and according to the Associated Press (AP), “The project is at a very preliminary phase and it will be years before any clinical treatment might be available.”
The Vatican proposal has the support of the Catholic Church, Cardinal Renato Martino told the AP, because it does not involve the use of embryonic stem cells. In 2007, Pope Benedict XVI stated that adult stem cell research protected the sanctity of human life–unlike embryonic stem cell research, which involves the destruction of human embryos.
Alessio Fasano, the University of Maryland’s Center for Celiac Research, will be leading the research, which will focus on the potential therapeutic uses of intestinal stem cells, which can generate a wide variety of different cell types and are replenished every few days.
“We want to harvest them, we want to isolate them, we want to make them grow outside our body and see if they are pluripotent,” told the AP on April 23. “If we reach that phase, if we are able to achieve that goal, then our next step is to eventually move to clinical application.”
The Catholic Church has vehemently opposed embryonic stem cell research. In November 2008, Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan, the President of the Pontifical Council of Health Care, told the Catholic News Agency that “stem cells produced by the destruction of embryos ‘serve no purpose'” and that the research “has not resulted in any significant cures so far and was ‘good for nothing.'”
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