There is real, concrete, you can smell/feel/see kind of evidence....
From the Archives -- WSJ Interactive Edition
April 13, 1999
Stem Cells From Adults
Have an Edge Battling Disease
By LAURA JOHANNES
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
The isolation of stem cells from an aborted fetus a few
months ago
sparked great excitement among scientists. Some of them
speculated
that the embryonic cells were a kind of miraculous clay
that, given
the proper nudge, could be turned into any type of human
cell -- and
even entire organs.
But a humbler type of stem cell may prove much more useful
to
medical science. Unlike the embryonic cell, this type,
called a
"precursor" cell, has already had its fate broadly
determined. For
example, scientists have discovered a blood precursor cell
that can
become any type of blood cell --say, a white cell or red
cell -- but
never a skin or bone cell.
While precursor cells' morphing potential is narrower,
many
scientists believe that turning them into medical
treatments will be
much easier, because they are further along in their
development.
That opens up a whole world of potential injectable
therapies that
would harness the body's capacity to regenerate itself.
"If you're trying to travel from Boston to San Francisco,
this would
be the equivalent of starting in Des Moines instead of
Boston," says
Mitchell J. Weiss, a senior scientist at Ontogeny Inc., of
Cambridge, Mass. Ontogeny is working with Biogen Inc. to
activate
precursor cells that it believes are in the brain in an
effort to
regenerate brain cells lost in Parkinson's disease.
Scientists used to think that such potential for cellular
regeneration was present only in embryos -- that, for
example,
humans had made their lifetime supply of brain cells by
age 17.
But that canon is steadily eroding. In the early 1990s,
researchers
isolated human blood stem cells from adults. And earlier
this month,
researchers at Osiris Therapeutics Inc. in Baltimore found
a stem
cell in adult bone marrow that is capable of becoming
bone,
cartilage or fat. Researchers also believe they may be
close to
identifying stem cells in the liver, brain and pancreas.
They're Everywhere
"I think we will find these stem cells in any organ that
we look,"
says Harvard Medical School researcher Evan Y. Snyder, who
has
already isolated brain stem cells from a human fetus and
believes it
won't be long before someone finds them in adult humans.
"I think
that when nature develops a strategy for development and a
strategy
for self-repair, it doesn't make it up each time for every
organ."
Some scientists remain skeptical that stem cells will be
found in
every organ. And hunting is a laborious process. Brain
stem cells
were found in animals a decade ago, but scientists are
still working
to find them in humans. But if and when they are found,
precursor
cells would circumvent the ethical and legal problems of
working
with embryonic stem cells taken from aborted fetuses.
Douglas A. Melton, chairman of the department of molecular
and cell
biology at Harvard University, has found promising results
in mouse
and frog stem cells but hasn't been able to obtain human
embryonic
cells to apply the work to humans.
The National Institutes of Health has said it will permit
federally
funded researchers to use stem cells as long as they don't
actually
handle aborted fetuses, but the cells won't be available
until
formal guidelines for their use have been published.
Meanwhile, work
with the stem cells found in adults is moving along
rapidly.
In early clinical trials in the area of AIDS, Novartis AG
is
purifying blood stem cells from HIV patients' own blood,
altering
them by inserting anti-HIV genes and then reinjecting them
in the
patients. "We expect the modified stem cells will give
rise to
progeny cells that are HIV-resistant," says Carol
Grundfest, a
Novartis spokeswoman.
Margaret Tuchman
Princeton, NJ
B1941/Dx1980
[log in to unmask]
