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U.S. Scientists Seek to Clone Human Embryos

Posted on: Tuesday, 6 June 2006, 18:00 CDT

PHILADELPHIA _ Two American research teams, one on each coast, said Tuesday they are trying to clone human embryos, then extract stem cells genetically matched to patients.

Scientists at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and the University of California at San Francisco said their goal is to create embryonic stem cell colonies to model certain diseases. That could lead to stem cell therapies, perhaps a decade or more from now.

The mere pursuit of those goals is controversial. The field remains under a cloud cast by disgraced South Korean researchers, who a year ago published a fraudulent paper that claimed to do what the Americans are now attempting. Some conservative groups oppose the research _ and government rules block federal funding of it _ because it requires destroying human embryos.

What's more, the technology to achieve key steps in the process of "therapeutic cloning" is hit or miss _ or nonexistent.

Scientists take a patient's adult cell and a woman's donated egg. The DNA from the adult cell is inserted into the egg, from which the DNA has been sucked out. An electrical or chemical signal fuses this "cloned" organism, which begins dividing into an embryo that, when it has about 60 cells, briefly contains embryonic stem cells.

Only one team in the world, at the University of Newcastle in the United Kingdom, has published evidence of cloning a human embryo to the 60-cells stage _ and it took 36 eggs donated by 11 women. The UK group did not try to harvest stem cells, much less try to coax them to become specialized cells such as nerves or pancreas cells.

Still, the researchers said they are in this for the long haul. Harvard's Douglas Melton, co-director of the stem cell institute, and Kevin Eggan, a molecular biologist, will initially focus on diabetes _ a disease that afflicts two of Melton's childen. Eggan also plans to try to make stem cell lines for studying amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's Disease.

George Daly, a Children's Hospital of Boston researcher affiliated with the Harvard institute, will study blood diseases such as sickle cell anemia and leukemia.

"We are convinced that working with embryonic stem cells holds tremendous promise for treatment of a host of currently intractable and incurable diseases," Harvard University Provost Steven Hyman said Tuesday.

At UCSF, researchers hope to model neurodegenerative diseases, including Parkinson's and Huntington's disease.

"We see this not only as a window into the mechanisms of disease, but also a platform for drug discovery," said Arnold Kriegstein, director of UCSF's Institute for Regeneration Medicine.

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(c) 2006, The Philadelphia Inquirer.

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Source: The Philadelphia Inquirer

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