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[QUOTE]Originally posted by Ace of Spades: [QB] Wednesday, Aug. 23, 2006 End Run Around the Stem-Cell Ban? As we've noted many times, scientists looking to develop stem cells into powerful therapies against an enormous number diseases ranging from diabetes to Parkinson's have been utterly frustrated by the Bush Administration's ban on federal funding. According to that policy, they can only use federal dollars on the handful of stem cell lines in existence at the time Bush's policy went into effect in 2001--a pitifully small, very finicky source. So far, scientists have responded in several ways. Some are trying to use adult stem cells, which may or may not turn out to be effective; others are using the state funding that's arisen in response to Bush's policy; still others have just given up and gone to countries, like China or Singapore or Britain, that have a more enlightened policy. But a little more than an hour ago, the American company Advanced Cell Technology reported in Nature that they may have a way to start up stem cell lines in a new way that could ultimately make non-federal research easier. By taking a single cell out of the seven or eight that make up an embryo at its earliest stages, they've left the embryo intact but managed to create stem cells from the one they removed. No embryo is destroyed in the process, which is one of the key no-no's in the Bush policy. It's actually not news that you can safely remove a cell from an embryo. It's done all the time in a procedure called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. The idea is that parents known to be carrying a potentially dangerous gene--for Tay-Sachs disease, say--do in-vitro (a.k.a. test tube) fertilization. One cell is removed, it's tested for genetic problems, and if there are none, the embryo is implanted and fertilization goes ahead. So scientists at ACT took a cell and tried to coax it into becoming a stem cell colony. Turned out it wasn't so easy, and in the end they had to use "feeder cells" from mice to nourish the human cells, and add other human stem cells to coax them to grow. That introduces contamination that makes the new line essentially useless for potential therapies. Dr. Robert Lanza, who did the research, thinks they can overcome these crutches: the embryos they used were frozen specimens that had been originally created for preimplantation diagnosis; fresh embryos might well be easier to work with. And while other scientists are very cautious about a full-fledged endorsement before others have replicated ACT's work, Dr. Arnold Kriegstein of the University of San Francisco’s Institute for Regeneration Medicine says: “It looks quite impressive. If it holds up, I think it has the promise of being a very significant advance in the field.” Important note: this entry is based on reporting by Alice Park —M.L. http://time.****s.com/eye_on_science/2006/08/end_run_around_.html [/QB][/QUOTE]
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