Posted within the hour on the Washington Post web site.
>
> Tony Mazzaschi
> AAMC
>
> Scientists: Stem Cells Colonies Created Without Harming Embryos
>
> By Rick Weiss
> Washington Post Staff Writer
> Thursday, January 10, 2008; 12:16 PM
>
> Scientists in Massachusetts said today they had created several colonies
> of human embryonic stem cells without harming the embryos from which
> they were derived, the latest in a series of recent advances that could
> speed development of stem cell-based treatments for a variety of
> diseases.
>
> In June, scientists in Japan and Wisconsin said they had made cells very
> similar to embryonic stem cells from adult skin cells, without involving
> embryos. But that technique so far requires the use of gene-altered
> viruses that contaminate the cells and limit their biomedical potential.
>
> By contrast, the new work shows for the first time that healthy, normal
> embryonic stem cells can be cultivated directly from embryos without
> destroying them.
>
> That means the work should be eligible for federal financing under
> President Bush's six-year-old policy of funding only stem cell research
> that does not harm embryos, said study leader Robert Lanza, chief
> scientific officer at Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester.
>
> But that is not likely, said Story Landis, who heads the National
> Institutes of Health stem cell task force, which oversees grants for
> studies on the medically promising cells.
>
> The embryos Lanza used, which were donated for research, appear not to
> have been damaged, Landis acknowledged. However, she said, "it is
> impossible to know definitively" that the embryos were not in some
> subtle way harmed by the experiment. And "no harm" is the basis of the
> Bush policy, she said.
>
> Landis said the only way to prove that the technique does not harm
> embryos would be to transfer many of them to women's wombs and see if
> the resulting babies were normal. But it would be unethical to do that
> experiment, she said, so the question cannot be answered.
>
> That standard has Lanza fuming. By all scientifically recognized
> measures, he said, the embryos -- currently frozen in suspended
> animation because they were donated for research and not to make babies
> -- are normal, he said.
>
> "I think the burden of proof lies with the NIH and the Bush
> administration to show that an embryo was harmed," Lanza said.
>
> The new technique involves the careful removal of a single cell from a
> newly formed eight-cell embryo and coaxing that cell to divide
> repeatedly until it forms a self-replenishing colony of embryonic stem
> cells.
>
> Fertility doctors perform such "single-cell biopsies" thousands of times
> every year to test the genetic health of embryos conceived by in vitro
> fertilization, with little or no apparent effect on the remaining seven
> cells' ability to form a normal baby. The idea is to check the removed
> cell for DNA defects and transfer to the woman's womb only embryos whose
> cells test normal.
>
> Lanza's team first reported growing stem cells from individual embryo
> cells in 2006. But that work was criticized for not showing plainly that
> the plucked embryos could develop normally, relying instead on evidence
> from the nation's many fertility clinics that embryos can survive the
> process.
>
> In the new experiments, he and his colleagues allowed their seven-cell
> embryos to continue growing in laboratory dishes for up to five days --
> the oldest that embryos are typically cultured in fertility clinic labs
> before being transferred to a mother's uterus.
>
> Of 43 embryos biopsied, 36 (or 83 percent) developed into healthy
> five-day-old embryos, as determined by various measures used by the
> clinics, the team reports in today's online edition of the journal Cell
> Stem Cell.
>
> That's a survival rate as good as or better than occurs with fertility
> clinic embryos generally, whether they are biopsied or not, according to
> several published reports.
>
> "The biopsy had no effect on the embryos' development," Lanza said,
> adding that the effort produced five new colonies of stem cells. That is
> a much higher efficiency than was previously achieved. And because of
> improved culture conditions, the new stem cells do not need to be fed
> chemicals from destroyed embryos, as was previously the case.
>
> "It is a technically impressive piece of work," said Douglas A. Melton
> of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. "They've demonstrated their ability
> to isolate human embryonic stem cell lines without destruction of the
> embryos" -- something few scientists thought possible just a few years
> ago.
>
> "But the fundamental ethical issue remains," said Kathy Hudson, director
> of the Genetics and Public Policy Center at Johns Hopkins University --
> namely, how to prove that the approach is inherently harmless.
>
> Very few studies have looked at the outcomes of fertility treatments in
> which biopsies had been performed, Hudson said. And those that have been
> done -- including a widely publicized July report that found that
> fertility clinic clients who had their embryos biopsied had about a 30
> percent lower chance of giving birth -- are riddled with flaws, she
> said.
>
> But one thing is clear, Hudson said: "Embryo biopsy is tricky and
> requires extraordinary good hands and technical skills. And even in the
> best hands, embryos are sometimes lost."
>
> As long as that risk is there, funding under Bush's policy will not be
> available, Landis said -- with one possible exception.
>
> Although NIH will not fund Lanza's method of making stem cells, she
> said, the agency might fund studies on the cells themselves once they
> are isolated from the embryos with private money and the embryos are
> shown to be healthy.
>
> Asked who would make that funding decision, Landis said it would be up
> to NIH officials. But pressed to say whether the White House would have
> an influence, she paused.
>
> "I'm sure they would have an interest in such a decision," she said.
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Rayilyn Brown
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Arizona Chapter National Parkinson's Foundation
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