This article from the Boston Globe contained some important statments
from researcher Kevin Eaggan on stem cell research and politics that were
omitted from many other articles today.

FROM: Boston Globe
Aug 22, 2005

Harvard scientists advance cell work
Technique doesn't destroy embryos
By Gareth Cook and Carey Goldberg, Globe Staff  |  August 22, 2005

Harvard scientists have created cells similar to human embryonic stem
cells without destroying embryos, a major step toward someday possibly
defusing the central objection to stem cell research.

The team showed that when a human skin cell was fused with an embryonic
stem cell, the resulting hybrid looked and acted like the stem cell. The
implications: It may eventually be possible to fashion tailor-made,
genetically matched stem cells for patients using such a cell fusion
technique, rather than by creating and then destroying a cloned embryo.
That use of early embryos is the main sticking point for opponents of
stem cell research.

**The Harvard researchers cautioned that the fusion technique, described
in this week's issue of the journal Science, is inefficient and deeply
flawed at this point, and emphasized that it should not deter embryonic
stem-cell research that involves embryos, nor diminish support for such
research.

**''Our technology is not ready for prime-time yet," said Kevin Eggan,
the paper's senior author and an assistant professor at Harvard. ''Our
results do not offer an alternative now."

**The paper comes amid debate in Congress over whether the federal
government should expand its financing for research on embryonic stem
cells, which are seen as potential treatments for a range of diseases
such as Type 1 diabetes and Parkinson's. Eggan said he feared that his
work could be cited by opponents who have argued for finding ways of
doing stem cell research without using human embryos.

**''The timing is complicated and I worry about it," Eggan said.

The work is part of a broader effort to find ways to conduct embryonic
stem-cell research without destroying embryos, a quest spurred by
politics but driven mostly by the needs of scientific inquiry.

There is a limited supply of human eggs, which are needed for creating
embryos through cloning, and egg donors face a slight health risk. The
new cell fusion technique would enable scientists to create vastly
greater quantities of embryonic stem cells for research.

That would mean they could do far more experiments aimed at understanding
what happens when a regular, adult cell is transformed into an embryonic
stem cell, a process known as ''reprogramming." Researchers are
struggling to determine how a cell that is ''adult," already committed to
its role in the body as, for example, a nerve cell or skin cell,
regresses back to the proto-state in which, as a stem cell, it could
still potentially become any of the hundreds of types of cells in the
body.

The cell fusion technique ''provides an experimental tool," said Azim
Surani, a Cambridge University professor who performed similar cell
fusion in mice and was not involved with the Eggan paper. ''It's not
something that we can use now, but it allows us to take steps toward
understanding this process of reprogramming."

To make an ''adult" cell regress to an embryonic stem-cell state without
needing an egg cell to do it ''is what a lot of scientists dream about
being able to do," he said. ''It opens up many different avenues in terms
of doing basic research."

The Harvard paper showed that the cell fusion would work in humans, and
went further, showing exactly how extensive the ''reprogramming" is --
that virtually all genes went from having a skin cell pattern to having
an embryonic stem-cell pattern. Under a microscope, the fused cell looked
like an embryonic stem cell. It could turn into many different types of
cells. And it had the chemical markers of embryonic stem cells.

''We've taken back a cell that had only one choice, a specialized
function, and we've given it back the power to make many different
choices, like an embryonic stem cell," said Chad Cowan, the paper's lead
author.

All the cells of your body have the same DNA, but there is a system,
called ''epigenetics," that turns some genes off and on. This is what
distinguishes a skin cell from another type of cell. And this is what
must be ''reprogrammed" to change the cell type.

In cloning, scientists use an egg cell to do the reprogramming. That is,
a nucleus from a skin cell is put in an egg cell that has had its nucleus
removed. Something in this egg cell changes the DNA around so that the
new nucleus now thinks it's a fertilized egg, and begins to develop.

Ultimately, using cell fusion could work better than using an egg for
human stem-cell therapy, Surani said.

But for now, gigantic obstacles remain. The most crucial flaw in the
fused cell was that it contained twice the genetic material that cells
usually carry, and there is no known way to return it to normal. Such
cells would be extremely risky to use for therapies in humans, though
they could be valuable for research.

Eggan said he planned to explore ways to solve the problem of the extra
genes. It could be possible to pull out the extra DNA before the fusing
process is complete.

Another option may be to reprogram the skin cell using the stem cell's
cytoplasm, the area of the cell that is outside the nucleus where DNA is
concentrated.

The other great obstacle to the cell fusion technique is its
inefficiency. When Cowan was creating the fused cells, he found that
about 50 million skin cells and 50 million embryonic stem cells would
yield only 10 or 20 of the fused hybrid cells. Fortunately, he said, the
resulting hybrid cells were stable and could be multiplied in culture.

The work was funded by the Naomie Berrie Diabetes Center, the Howard
Hughes Medical Institute, and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. It used a
line of embryonic stem cells created by Harvard's Doug Melton, but some
of the work was repeated with a federally approved stem-cell line so that
other researchers, who depend on federal funds, would be able to try to
replicate it.

Only work using human embryonic stem-cell lines created before Aug. 9,
2001, is eligible for federal funding under a policy put in place by
President Bush. Legislation that has been passed by the House and pending
in the Senate would loosen those restrictions to allow use of stem cell
lines created after that date.

If researchers manage to understand reprogramming well enough, Cowan
said, it may someday be possible to use drugs to induce, for example, a
pancreas cell in a diabetic patient to go back in time to its stem-cell
state and transform itself into the kind of pancreas cell that makes
needed insulin.

But that, he said, is still science fiction. In the nearer future, the
cell fusion technique offers the prospect of the kind of ''limitless
supply of human embryonic stem cells" that could allow researchers to
forge ahead toward figuring out reprogramming.

''You can now start to figure out the pieces of that puzzle, through
biochemistry and genes," he said. And because the cells are human cells,
''You cannot only figure out how it works but how it works for humans,
which would be clinically relevant."


http://www.boston.com/news/science/articles/2005/08/22/harvard_scientists
_advance_cell_work/

----------------------------------------------------------------------
To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: mailto:[log in to unmask]
In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn