 |
 |
Neurologist Says Stem Cells Hold Benefits By Robin Williams Adams - The Ledger [log in to unmask] Published Friday, November 5, 2004 LAKELAND -- Life and death go hand in hand in Dr. Juan Sanchez-Ramos' work with cells. As a neurologist and researcher, he was frustrated with medicine's limited ability to treat the brain-cell destruction of stroke and Parkinson's disease. "If I understood how neurons die, I might intervene with chemical methods to prevent them from dying," the University of South Florida professor said. "If I understood their process of dying, I could prolong their survival." In studying why cells die, he became fascinated with how they are born and develop. That led him into stem-cell research. Stem cells can self-renew and give rise to many different types of cells, he said Tuesday at the first of a three-part series on stem- cell research. Sanchez-Ramos' talk primarily focused on the science of embryonic stem cells -- and benefits he expects from them -- rather than on the controversy surrounding research using them. "We're going to regenerate limbs," he said. "We're going to regenerate lives." Much of that won't be in his lifetime or that of the audience, he said, but it is coming. "Cell therapy is the wave of the future," he said. Many people have had cell therapy in the form of blood transfusions and bone-marrow transplants. Bone marrow, soft tissue, produces blood cells. Sanchez-Ramos said he hasn't worked with human embryos for "ethical, logistic and biological reasons." He works with cells from adult human tissue or from fetal mouse tissue. But he is enthusiastic about embryonic stem cells. Research with embryonic stem cells will help scientists learn to better use adult stem cells, Sanchez-Ramos said. He sees that research as having great potential. He said it can explain the complex events of human development. It can change the way drugs are developed and tested by allowing the ability to test them on human cell lines. And it can generate cells and tissue for cell therapy. Unlike adult tissue, which can produce a limited number of cell types, embryonic stem cells have the ability to create many. "They're much more versatile than any other stem cell," he said. "They can turn into any cell type." It starts with an egg. "The mother of all stem cells is the fertilized egg," he said. The fertilized egg multiplies and becomes a blastocyst. A blastocyst is a hollow sphere that contains embryonic stem cells. The blastocyst is what goes into the uterus and develops into a baby, Sanchez-Ramos said. In stem-cell research, the "inner cell mass" would be removed from the blastocyst for study. "If you take only the inner cell mass, you cannot create a human being," Sanchez-Ramos said. "You have to put the whole blastocyst inside the uterus." But opponents of embryonic stem cell research have moral objections to removing the inner cell mass from the blastocyst. Fertility clinics store extra blastocysts, which can become embryos and then babies, but many go unused, Sanchez-Ramos said. "We have hundreds and hundreds of frozen blastocysts that are not being used and are due to be discarded but cannot be used for research funded by the federal government," he said. President Bush restricted federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research to existing cell lines. Stem-cell advocates see the prospect of new treatments for a host of diseases, including spinal-cord injuries, diabetes and Alzheimer's. The research is in its infancy, however. "The biology is not advanced enough that we can use embryonic stem cells for any neurologic disease," Sanchez-Ramos said. SOURCE: The Ledger, FL http://tinyurl.com/5x24f * * *Murray Charters <[log in to unmask]> Please place this address in your address book Please purge all others Web site: Parkinsons Resources on the WWWeb http://www.geocities.com/murraycharters ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: mailto:[log in to unmask] In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn