 |
 |
Electronic Telegraph - UK ISSUE 2101 Saturday 24 February 2001 Stem cell breakthrough could end cloning row By Roger Highfield, Science Editor SCIENTISTS have turned skin cells into beating heart cells that could be used to repair a damaged heart. First they "turned the clock back" on the cells to produce stem cells, which have the ability to develop into any desired type, from nerve to liver and muscle. Then they transformed those into heart cells. The breakthrough has been achieved using cells from cattle, but work on human cells will start in a few months. Even a speck of dandruff could be used to start the process. If perfected, it would sidestep therapeutic cloning, which involves the creation and destruction of human embryos to make tissue for repairs to the body. Pro-life groups bitterly oppose this, which they liken to human sacrifice. The new development, by an American subsidiary of the British biotech company PPL Therapeutics, was announced at a meeting of the British Fertility Society in London yesterday. It marks the first step towards what Prof Liam Donaldson, Chief Medical Officer, has called the "Holy Grail": the ability to make a patient's own tissue without destroying cloned embryos. Dr Alan Colman, research director at PPL, stressed that it was too early to rule out therapeutic cloning, which was recently approved, and said that all options should be kept open. He said: "If we can replace the more controversial source with this source, all well and good. But we can't promise that at present." Dr Ron James, managing director, said: "I believe that the method we are developing as a source of stem cells will be equally applicable to humans." For commercial reasons, details were not disclosed and the company has applied for patents. But a clue was given in PPL's statement. It described how a marker gene was inserted into the initial skin cell population so that scientists could identify resulting stem and heart cells. This suggests that the cells were in a larger population of tissue. If scientists had converted skin cells into heart cells in a test tube, there would have been no need to label them. PPL's initial commercial target for its stem cell research is to grow pancreatic islet cells, which produce insulin, for the treatment of diabetes. http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/et?ac=004418831663244&rtmo=weAQ05tb&atmo=weAQ05tb&pg=/et/01/2/24/nstem24.html ***********