Stem Cell Research Heads for a Renaissance

By Rick Weiss, Science Progress. Posted November 24, 2008.

But despite the encouraging evidence to date, the cells are new and different enough that the FDA is opting to play it conservatively. It may be, one official said, that despite the promise shown in animal studies, patients with partial paralysis or Parkinson's disease are not the ideal first subjects for embryonic stem cell experiments. That's because despite their compromised condition, they can in most cases expect to live long and relatively satisfying lives. Instead, suggested FDA investigator Deborah Hursh, researchers may want to choose patients whose ailments portend "very limited life-spans."

"We'll let you be pretty experimental with that population," Hursh said.

One futuristic approach under consideration by some researchers: Instead of injecting the millions of cells that are probably going to be needed to have a clinically significant effect on patients, cultivate those cells on a three-dimensional matrix to grow a solid organ or part of an organ -- say the left ventricle for a human heart. Such "heart parts" would be ready to use as a unit, would stay in place once patched into the patient's own organ, and -- unlike millions of freely circulating individual cells -- could be removed if need be, thus solving what Lawrence Goldstein, a stem cell researcher at the University of California, San Diego, called "the exit strategy problem" of cell-based therapies.

A number of researchers noted that there is great enthusiasm for a new kind of cell created in the past year that seems to have most of the characteristics of human embryonic stem cells but can be derived without the destruction of human embryos. But they also warned that, so far, at least, these so-called iPS cells have their own drawbacks, including genetic alterations that can trigger tumor growth and uncertainties about whether they could escape attack by a patient's immune system, even if they were grown from that patient's own skin cells.

"I don't think it has been unequivocally shown" that iPS cells won't be rejected, said Kenneth Chien, of the Massachusetts General Hospital and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. iPS cells represent an "amazing technology," he said. But embryonic stem cells "are the gold standard."

One element of the stem cell research field was universally apparent at the meeting: An irrepressible sense of relief that the Bush administration, reviled by so many in the stem cell field because of its 2001 research restrictions, will soon be over. And a palpable anticipatory enthusiasm about statements by the Obama-Biden camp that it intends to lift those restrictions early in the new administration. Although the details of how that policy transition will occur remain under wraps, virtually everyone in the field expects it to result in a scientific Renaissance.

"In the end we will end up with a much better policy," a government-funded scientist said in an interview, preferring to remain anonymous for now. "I think it will be a wonderful new era."

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Rick Weiss is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress.

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