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Analysis: Stem Cell Work Surviving Scandal

Posted on: Monday, 20 February 2006, 12:00 CST

By ED SUSMAN

The scientific community, especially research into embryonic stem cells as potential cures for devastating diseases, suffered a staggering setback from the South Korean research scandal in which groundbreaking work was revealed as fakery.

However, scientists at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) said that finding ways to coax embryonic cells into tools for treating human diseases has continued -- despite lack of U.S. government funding and fallout from the Korean scandal.

I am excited about embryonic stem cell research, said Laurie Zoloth, professor of medical ethics and humanities, at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University, Chicago, Ill. But the Korean failure and the fraud came as a body blow to those of us in the scientific community and to the hopes of millions of people. How do we now know what is reality?

Researchers in Seoul, Korea, announced last year that they had been able to create lines of cloned human stem cells from human embryos. Others have been able to clone stem cells in mice and other species but not from human embryos, said Leonard Zon, professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and Children's Hospital Boston.

We had hoped that if human stem cells had been cloned from embryos a crucial step on the way to possible treatment of many diseases would have been accomplished, he told United Press International.

However, he said the realization that the cell lines didn't exist was not a compete setback because work continues in multiple laboratories to reproduce the success claimed by Hwang Woo Suk of South Korea whose falsified results had been published in the prestigious journal Science.

We in the scientific world are always skeptical, said Evan Snyder, director of the stem cell and regeneration program at the Burnham Institute, La Jolla, Calif., a an AAAS briefing on stem cell research Friday. We really don't believe something until it has been replicated two, three, a dozen times. We were waiting to see if the work in Korea could be replicated.

Despite the body blow, researchers are continuing to work on ways of turning embryonic stem cells into soldiers against disease. Zon, who is studying the zebra fish for genetic clues that may someday save the lives of patients with blood system cancers, said that if the Korean data had been true it would have still been five years before human trials of embryonic stem cells could have begun. Now it will be longer - maybe 8 to 10 years, he told UPI.

Zon has created mutant zebra fish. He soaks normal breeding male fish in chemicals and then mates them with normal female zebra fish. The abnormal offspring may include a mutant fish that has blood without red cells. By comparing the genes of that mutation to normal zebra fish, he has been able to find the genetic switch that turns on the manufacture of red blood cells.

From there, he has been able to use the same techniques to create red cells in mice that subsequently cure immune deficiency in those animals.

In humans, curing diseases such as leukemia can require wiping out the native immune system, which is followed by blood marrow transplants to restore the destroyed immune system. But two-thirds of patients now have no suitable donors. Zon hopes his zebra fish experiments will lead to embryonic human stem cells being turned on to fill that therapeutic gap.

Another use of embryonic stem cells, said Lawrence Goldstein, professor of cellular and molecular medicine at the University of California, San Diego, and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, will be to use them as a human model of Alzheimer's disease and allow doctors to test therapies before they go into humans.

We are currently working to generate human neurons from embryonic stem cells that carry a rare form of Alzheimer's disease mutants to try and test several hypotheses of what causes the disease, he said. He said current animal models don't provide the answers, but he thinks stems cells will.

Snyder of the Burnham Institute is trying to use embryonic stem cells to become cellular level firemen that will seek out dying or threatened cells by locating sites of inflammation in the body and then rushing there to rescue those cells from destruction - a possible scenario in numerous degenerative diseases.

He is trying to figure how the stem cells do that. He admits that the human body still knows more about how to do that than scientists. Even the dumbest stem cell is smarter than the smartest neurobiologist in growing adequate concentrations of cells, Snyder said.

Researchers also say stem cells could be coaxed into making replacement organs or other tissues, cultivating bone marrow and probably scores of other tasks.

The obstacles that confront them however, are not only understanding the science, but negotiating ethical, legal and -- sometimes -- fraudulent roadblocks.

Source: United Press International

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