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Nobel Prizes and
"Surplus Embryos"
By Dave Andrusko
In 2006 Professor Yamanaka, director of the Center for iPS Cell Research and Application at Kyoto University in Japan, coaxed ordinary skin cells into reverting to a state virtually indistinguishable from embryonic stem cells--so-called induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. Along with adult stem cells, iPS cells are the ethically acceptable (and to date far more productive) alternative to stem cells harvested from human embryos--embryos typically "left over" at fertility clinics. Who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine? Robert G. Edwards. His " breakthrough development of in vitro fertilization… led to the birth of the first 'test-tube baby,' Louise Brown, in 1978," according to the Washington Post's Rob Stein. The connection to Yamanaka's work didn't click in my foggy brain until I read the next sentence. "In the ensuing decades, the pioneering techniques that won the British biologist a Nobel Prize on Monday have played a part in controversial scientific advances such as cloning and the creation of human embryonic stem cells," according to the Post's Rob Stein. "IVF has been crucial for human embryonic stem cell research because the cells are obtained from embryos left over at infertility clinics. At the same time, the techniques helped lay the groundwork for the 1996 cloning of Dolly the sheep, a procedure that could eventually be tried in humans." Ironically, Edwards received his prize four days after a stunning advance--let me repeat a stunning advance--in iPS cell therapy from a team led by Derrick Rossi of Children's Hospital Boston and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. Rossi and his colleagues reported the work in a paper published online Thursday by the journal Cell Stem Cell. For all there was good to say about iPS cell research, there has been both a safety and an efficiency drawback. Although not the only way, the principal technique to make these cells "go back in time" was to infect the cell (typically a skin cell) with a "virus which implants the four genes that make the control switches into the DNA of the skin cell," according to Andy Coghlan. "But because the virus inserts the genes randomly into the skin cell's DNA, there is a risk of accidentally activating cancer-causing genes, making the method too risky for clinical use." The ingenuity of Rossi and his colleagues is amazing. "Rossi and his colleagues got round this problem by adding messenger RNA (mRNA) copies of the four genes to the fluid within cells, where they are made directly into the four switches," Coghlan wrote on the New Scientist webpage. "The DNA of the skin cell is unchanged." In addition, there had been the low payoff. "The best strategies reprogrammed only 1 out of 1000 cells exposed to the treatment, and it took more than a month for iPS cells to appear," Gretchen Vogel (of Science Now) explained. However there was a forty fold increase with the new technique! If that weren't enough, "Once they had created iPSCs, Rossi and his team showed they could use a similar technique to turn them into muscle cells"--and within days. By coaxing "those cells to morph into specific tissues," Stein reported, it means they "would be a perfect match for transplantation into patients." Please send your comments on Today's News & Views and National Right to Life News Today to daveandrusko@gmail.com. If you like, join those who are following me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/daveha. |
Curious
how life plays out and also what you miss that is right in front
of your nose. In the back of my way-too-cluttered mind, I meant
to keep track of whether Professor Shinya Yamanaka won a Nobel
Prize in Medicine this year, and then forgot entirely until
today.