Stem cell cloning gets fresh start
Posted by Terri Somers
on Jan 12,2006
SAN DIEGO - California scientists are planning to jump into the field of cloning human embryonic stem cells now that a South Korean scientist who claimed to have mastered the technique has been exposed as a fake.
In San Diego, stem cell researchers at the University of California San Diego and the private Burnham Institute are discussing how together they could research the process that until recently was believed to have been mastered by a team at Seoul National University.
Scientists at the University of California San Francisco and Stanford University have also announced plans to get into the field. They plan to apply for funding from California's $3 billion stem cell initiative approved by voters in 2004. UCSD and Burnham may eventually do the same.
"My guess is that just about everyone who has a stem cell research center is going to jump into this," said Jeanne Loring, a stem cell researcher at the Burnham Institute in La Jolla.
All of the California research institutes stressed that in moving forward, they will follow the latest and strictest ethical guidelines to avoid the lapses uncovered in South Korea.
Researchers in that country claimed to have mastered a process for cloning embryonic stem cells, which theoretically would allow scientists to create patient-specific tissue that could be used to replace cells destroyed by diseases such as Parkinson's.
Now scientists aren't exactly sure what it will take to clone human embryonic stem cells, said Larry Goldstein, a stem cell researcher at UCSD.
"But we've been working with lots of different mammalian species for a long time - scientists have cloned mice cells and cow cells and the technique produced Dolly the (cloned) sheep - so most of us don't believe there's a magic ingredient," Goldstein said. "It's a matter of getting skillful people in the same place, a sufficient number of ovocytes and good quality donor cells to pull it off."
Between UCSD and Burnham, many of the pieces are in place for stem cell cloning research.
Burnham has an embryo bank with more than 800 fertilized eggs donated after they were left over at in vitro fertilization clinics. Burnham scientists have the ability to make, or grow, different lines of embryonic stem cells. And the institute has the equipment that would be needed, said Dr. Evan Snyder, who heads Burnham's stem cell program.
Neither Burnham or UCSD has anyone with experience with the process of transferring DNA into the nucleus of human cells.
Cloning human embryonic stem cells requires using many hard-to-acquire human eggs, which would make it "silly" to have two separate labs in La Jolla and not be communicating, he said.
might as well use what there is parsimoniously, and with intelligence, and not duplicate our efforts," Snyder said.
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