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Scientists Make Key Stem Cell Advance ; Grow Them Without Harming Embryos

Posted on: Monday, 17 October 2005, 15:00 CDT

By From news service reports

WASHINGTON - Two teams of scientists provided the first definitive evidence Sunday that embryonic stem cells can be grown in laboratory dishes without harming healthy embryos, an advance that some scientists and philosophers believe could make the medically promising field more politically and ethically acceptable.

The work, done with mouse cells, generated several colonies of mouse embryonic stem cells without destroying any embryos that otherwise could have developed into mice.

If the new approaches were to work with human cells, as many scientists suspect they will, they could help defuse a moral maelstrom that has raged since human embryonic stem cells were discovered seven years ago.

The new mouse studies were described in Sunday's online issue of the journal Nature.

In one study, researchers plucked a single cell from eight-cell mouse embryos, which were about two days old. While fertility clinics use such a cell for genetic testing, the researchers cultured the plucked cells and found they behaved like embryonic stem cells. The embryos, meanwhile, went on to produce mice.

In the second mouse study, researchers took eggs whose DNA- containing nuclei had been removed and inserted in each one a nucleus from a body cell of a mouse. But before the insertion, they blocked the action of a key gene in the nuclei, to ensure the eggs could not produce an embryo that can implant in a uterus. Yet, the eggs divided and grew enough to yield stem cells.

Stem cells from days-old human embryos can morph into virtually every kind of tissue, including nerves to replace those destroyed by spinal injuries and cardiac muscle to fill in for cells lost in a heart attack. Scientists see stem cells as the key to a new era of regenerative medicine.

Until now, however, the only way to get these cells was to destroy young embryos. Objections to embryo destruction have led to a ban on federal funding for such work, which scientists say hampers research.

Source: Record, The; Bergen County, N.J.

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