This article was brought to my attention by Vernice Roberts of the famed New
York Panhandlers. The article appears in today's Newsday's Health & Discovery
section.
My paranoia (not drug induced) is raging! How do the learned members of Congress
reconcile on-going fetal cell transplant research in so many disease categories
and yet black-ball PD research?
We need to inform the congressional members of the Pro-life coalition that
science
and enligthement can no longer be denied. Didn't the Renaissance period
start many
centuries ago?
Margaret
http://www.newsday.com/mainnews/rnmi0nin.htm
8/12/97
Paralysis: A Test With Fetal Cells
By Delthia Ricks. STAFF WRITER
A HUMAN experiment under way in Florida eventually could provide
clues about restoring function and mobility to people paralyzed by
spinal-cord disorders.
Attempts historically have been plagued by two grim facts of life:
Nerve cells don't regenerate. And once injured, even healthy nerves in a
wound's vicinity become vulnerable to attack by voracious, tissue-destroying
molecules called free radicals.
In the Florida test, a paralyzed patient, the first in this country,
underwent a pioneering transplant of human fetal cells into his spinal
column last month.
Doctors in New York, meanwhile, are planning a maverick foray into
the human brain, possibly later this year, with a cross-species transplant:
They aim to put fetal pig cells in the dopamine-deficient regions of
Parkinson's disease patients' brains.
Both operations are part of renewed attempts to resurrect function
destroyed by injury or disease and to benefit from a decade of study on
reasons why nerve cells die.
Despite the daring Florida experiment, doctors are certain their
patient will never walk. What they hope to gain is a sense of whether the
operation is feasible in other patients, making their first attempt a living
lesson for similar transplants in the future.
With 10,000 spinal-cord injuries annually in the United States
causing permanent paralysis, the experiment's outcome could have
far-reaching implications, doctors say.
"It was never our goal in this study to see substantial change," said
Dr. Richard Fessler, a professor of neurosurgery at the University of
Florida's College of Medicine in Gainesville. Fessler performed the
fetalcell transplant. "What we want to know is whether we can perform this
technique well and whether the tissue will grow."
For the patient, who has requested anonymity, the operation could
halt the erosion of spinal nerves in a rare paralyzing condition called
syringomyelia - if the grafts take.
For doctors, having the grafts proliferate could signal that the
procedure eventually may be a reliable way to restore mobility in patients
whose spines are impaired by accidents and disease.
Still, transplanting human fetal cells into chronically ill or
injured patients is a procedure fraught with questions and controversy.
Dr. Warren Olanow, chairman of neurology at Mount Sinai Medical
Center in New York, said efforts to ban the use of fetal cells have forced
physicians to seek other ways of restoring nerve-cell function in sick or
injured patients. He has overseen 25 human fetal-cell transplants in Mount
Sinai patients with Parkinson's disease and is seeking additional
Parkinson's patients
to undergo the procedure - despite pockets of protest.
Preliminary results of the operations, which have been conducted
during the past two years, show that fetal-cell grafts injected into
deficient areas of the Parkinson's brain can flourish. Results from Olanow's
studies have encouraged the team in Gainesville.
In the meantime, Olanow is awaiting Food and Drug Administration
approval to use fetal-pig-cell transplants in Parkinson's patients. The
first of those pioneering operations could be performed later this year.
"When we can use another type of cell without all of the societal
issues, then that's a way to go," Olanow said. "But the human cells are the
best. No question."
Scientists in this country and abroad are working on ways to make
fetal-pig cells adapt readily to the human brain and become less likely to
be rejected. They are also attempting to genetically engineer nerve cells
that can secrete various neurotransmitters, chemical communication
substances, that carry messages from one nerve cell to another. People with
Parkinson's disease, for example, lack enough of the cells that produce the
neurotransmitter dopamine.
The Gainesville team, meanwhile, plans a series of human fetalcell
transplants in 10 other patients with syringomyelia.
Doctors in Tampa, Chicago, Denver and Los Angeles are planning human
fetal-cell transplants for patients with Parkinson's, Huntington's and
diabetes this year.
"Years and years of planning went into this procedure," Fessler said
of the spinal operation that proceeded flawlessly earlier this month. He
worked with a team of neuroscientists and neurologists in a series of animal
experiments long before the first person was put on an operating table.
During a 15-year investigative period the transplant technique was
tested in cats and rats with surgically induced spinal impairments.
The animals, for the most part, were transplanted with
species-specific cells, usually a cocktail of nerve tissues taken from the
fetal animal's brainstem and spinal cord. Fetal cells appeared to reunite
the damaged ends of the animals' spinal cords.
These landmark studies first showed in 1992 that limited mobility and
sensation can be restored. Subsequent attempts to restore function to spinal
nerves by surgeons in Russia and Sweden, who transplanted human-fetal cells
into the spinal columns of human patients, were met with limited success.
But the notion of using fetal-cell transplants as a possible
treatment for injuries and disease first surfaced more than half a century ago.
Scientists theorized that fetal nerve tissue might help restore
communication between damaged nerve cells. The idea was a tantalizing one,
because it would provide a way to unlock the door to nerve-cell
regeneration, and it held the promise of potential cures.
Priming injured portions of the central nervous system with fetal
cells, scientists thought, could be an effective way of seeding the growth
of new nerves.
Fetal cells serve as progenitors and are capable, theoretically, of
differentiating into the various types of nerve cells that populate the
central nervous system.
The cells are ideal, Fessler said, because they grow quickly and
divide rapidly. And while many attempts to use the cells against disorders
such as Parkinson's failed when the transplants became popular a decade ago,
doctors believe the basic science behind the operation is now more refined.
"We know more now than we did in the Eighties," Fessler said. "We
can't predict the outcome once we do this, but we know a lot more going in."
Transplanting Fetal Cells
How the recent transplant of fetal cells into an adult's spinal cord
worked and what is supposed to happen.
1) Cells are taken from an embryonic spinal cord.
2) The cells are injected into the injured portion of the spinal cord.
3) The cells differentiate into the various types of nerve cells in
the spinal cord and grow neural tissue.
Margaret Tuchman (55yrs, Dx 1980)- NJ-08540
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