Hi Marty, If not posted elsewhere in this string, here's the Milwaukee Journal/Sentinal story of the UW-Madison end of this research:
UW makes transplant breakthrough
Research could lead to unlimited supply of made-to-order cells
By Marilynn Marchione
of the Journal Sentinel staff
November 6, 1998
After 17 years of international competition among research centers, University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists are announcing today that they are the first to isolate and grow human embryonic "master cells," from which all other types of cells and tissue arise.
The achievement makes more feasible the dream that scientists someday can grow heart cells and other kinds of human tissue in a lab dish, for use in transplants. It also offers hope of better treatment for such diseases as Parkinson's and some forms of diabetes, in which a specific type of cell has been destroyed or is impaired.
"It opens the door to growing from scratch everything from heart muscle to bone marrow and brain tissue," a statement from UW says.
The work is published in today's issue of Science. An accompanying editorial by Johns Hopkins University researcher John Gearhart calls the UW work "a major technical achievement with great importance for human biology" and "enormous potential" for treating diseases.
Gearhart next week will publish similar research, in which his team isolated and grew stem cells from a different source -- aborted fetal tissue, which is farther developed than the embryonic cells UW used. The Hopkins scientists only recently allowed their cells to mature a tiny bit, and they have not demonstrated that they can differentiate their cells into all the tissue types that compose the body, as UW showed its cells could do.
The UW team was led by biologist James Thomson, who in 1995 was the first to isolate and grow similar cells in primates. Scientists in Israel participated.
The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, an independent corporation affiliated with UW, has applied for a patent for the technology, and Geron Corp., a California biotechnology firm, has a license to develop it.
The quest to grow such cells was so great that Geron funded research at UW, Johns Hopkins and the University of California at San Francisco, creating competition among them to be the first to succeed. Other groups of researchers abroad have been pursuing the same kinds of results.
"Our hope is that these cells could be grown in the laboratory and then used to regenerate failing tissue," a statement by a Geron official says. "Because these cells do not age, they could be used to generate virtually a limitless supply of cells and tissue for transplantation."
The cells came from blastocysts -- balls of 140 cells that develop after fertilization -- donated by couples who successfully sought treatment for infertility.
"These cells are not the equivalent of an intact embryo," Thomson emphasized. "If you took a clump of them and implanted them in a woman, they would not develop into a fetus."
Because of public controversy over human embryo research and a ban on using federal money for it, only private money was used.
Norman Fost, chairman of UW's bioethics advisory committee, said the research conforms to ethics standards set by national review panels. The standards condemn cloning whole human organisms, creating human embryos for research, or allowing embryos to develop neural structures, he said.
The UW work involves none of those things and "is clearly in the acceptable categories," Fost said.
The cells removed from the blastocysts are embryonic stem cells, or "cells that don't know what they want to be when they grow up," but can be anything they want, as Thomson put it.
They're different from, but also somewhat similar to, the stem cells that are in bone marrow and circulating blood. Bone marrow stem cells mature into all the types of blood cells in the body, including those that form the immune system. The bone marrow stem cells are used in transplants to treat cancer.
Embryonic stem cells are more primordial than that. They exist only briefly in nature because they quickly differentiate -- within a couple of days -- into the different types of cells and tissues that form an organism.
UW researchers established five stem cell lines (colonies) and have been growing them in culture since January. They watched the cells differentiate into types that give rise to cartilage, bone, muscle, neural and gut cells.
In other groups of cells, they've been able to keep stem cell lines going since January and prevent them from differentiating, which was "the hard part" of the research, Thomson said.
DNA analysis shows that the cells "are normal in every way," he said. "They appear to be immortal, and they retain the ability to form virtually all the individual cells that make up the adult body."
The biggest hope for such technology is that it will enable transplants of tissue or cells to replace those that have been destroyed and that the body can't replace, Thomson said. Examples are heart muscle cells damaged by heart attacks, pancreatic islet cells damaged by diabetes, and neural cells damaged by spinal cord injuries or neurodegenerative diseases.
Researchers do not expect to be able to "grow" whole organs for transplant, but being able to transplant tissue to cure some diseases could take the pressure off the scarce supply of organs.
Embryonic stem cell lines also could enable drug researchers to quickly screen thousands of chemicals to see whether they pose potential problems as medicines before they're tested on humans.
The next step, Thomson said, is for researchers to find a way to direct embryonic stem cell cultures so that they differentiate into specific tissues, such as heart muscle and pancreatic cells.
Another hurdle is finding ways to keep the immune system from attacking the transplanted cells, causing rejection.
"The advantage of these cells is they could be genetically modified" to minimize rejection potential, Thomson said.
"It's an important first step," he said of the work published today.
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That news and the other pieces was good for a 177% one week run!! Congratulations longs!
Best regards, Tom |
