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Effective Alternative to Embryonic Stem Cells Researchers at Wake Forest University in North Carolina and Children’s Hospital in Boston have provided a possible way around the stalemate over proposals to lethally harvest stem cells from human embryos. Just days before the January 11 vote by the House of Representatives in favor of a measure that would mandate federal funding of the type of stem cell research that requires the killing of human embryos, a team led by Dr. Anthony Atala published results in Nature Biotechnology revealing they had found “amniotic-fluid stem cells” in the fluid which surrounds the developing baby and the placenta. “It has been known for decades that both the placenta and amniotic fluid contain multiple progenitor cell types from the developing embryo, including fat, bone, and muscle,” Atala told reporters. “We asked the question, ‘Is there a possibility that within this cell population we can capture true stem cells?’ The answer is yes.” Dr. Atala said that amniotic-fluid stem cells are “somewhere in between” embryonic stem cells and adult stem cells. What made the discovery so remarkable was that amniotic-fluid stem cells are both ethically unobjectionable and give every evidence of combining the best qualities of stem cells found in human embryos (with none of the troublesome side effects, such as a tendency to form tumors) and in adult sources. “What Dr. Atala has done is to present eloquently, for the first time, the real power that these cells have,” Dr. Roger De Filippo, an urologist and tissue engineer at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles, told Newsweek’s Mary Carmichael. Dr. Filippo called the research a “sentinel paper.” Like embryonic stem cells, amniotic-fluid stem cells multiply rapidly and are “pluripotent, or able to transform into fully-grown cells representing each of the three major kinds of tissue found in the body,” wrote Carmichael. “Using stem cells taken by amniocentesis from 19 pregnant women, Atala and his colleagues were able to create in the lab nerve cells, liver cells, endothelial cells (which line blood vessels) and cells involved in the creation of bone, muscle and fat.” Dr. Atala’s lab’s amniotic-fluid stem cells divided “at the impressive clip of once every 36 hours yet never showing signs of aging and never becoming tumors—even after living for more than two years in the lab,” according to the Washington Post’s Rick Weiss. “Dr. Dario Fauza, a surgeon at Children’s Hospital Boston, says he had achieved comparable results working with stem cells from amniotic fluid,” according to Carmichael. “The cells are hardy, a trait that makes them relatively easy to culture,” continued Carmichael. “‘If you think about where they are in nature, they’re floating in the amniotic fluid, in which there is very little oxygen,” said Fauza. “So they are very tolerant to low oxygen levels, which makes it easier to manipulate them in the lab.” There are still further advantages. According to Weiss, “[B]ecause the cells are a genetic match to the developing fetus, tissues grown from them in the laboratory will not be rejected if they are used to treat birth defects in that newborn, researchers said.” He added, “Alternatively, the cells could be frozen, providing a personalized tissue bank for use later in life.” Dr. Atala told Weiss “that if 100,000 women donated their amniotic cells to a bank, that would provide enough cells of sufficient genetic diversity to provide immunologically compatible tissues for virtually everyone in the United States.” Richard Doerflinger, deputy director of the Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, not only praised this important discovery but also placed it in context. “In short, these cells (along with similar cells recently found in cord blood, bone marrow and elsewhere) may have the practical advantages of embryonic stem cells for helping patients, with none of the practical or moral disadvantages,” he said. |