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Ultimate Stem Cell Discovered
bofh31337 writes "Newscientist is reporting that the University of Minnesota has discovered a new stem cell in adults. It is thought this stem cell will be able to turn into any single tissue in the body." The article is kinda breathy, especially for New Scientist - but if this is true, which needs to be studied more, this will dramatically alter the landscape for stem cell research.
The cells seem to grow indefinitely in culture, like ESCs. Some cell lines have been growing for almost two years and have kept their characteristics, with no signs of ageing, she says.
Two years? Damn, now that's an example careful experimentation. Although, I'd like to know what "aging" implies, and if she'd have to wait 80 or so years to see real human aging. Any biologists out there care to explain what aging looks like on the cellular level?
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Oh no! Extracting and growing these cells to cure diseases would be like killing millions and millions of clones of yourself! It's like having a million abortions, or even worse, committing suicide a million times over! We must ban research immediately! If God had wanted us to be healed, He wouldn't have let us get sick in the first place!
One other very promising source of stem cells is from liposuction - check out StemSource for details
John 17:20
How many evil companies would even bother discovering things if they could not be pantented? Do you think new drugs just grow on trees?
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
If you donate stem cells from willing adults, you don't have all the ethical arguments you get with harvesting human embryos. Not really sure which side of that argument I fall on, but if we can avoid the argument altogether and concentrate on the science instead, things would move along faster.
Hopefully these stem cells are as useful as the embryonic ones are.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
What country do you live in that doesn't allow ADULT stem-cell research? Go ahead, do the research yourself in your garage...it's legal.
http://www.micab.umn.edu/faculty/Verfaillie.html
m d= Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=11458512&dopt=Abstrac t
and an abstract of one stem cell paper is at
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?c
"others think the selection process actually creates the MAPCs.
.with no signs of ageing" could herald this find as biomedical fountain of youth, the raoyalties could be astronomical, especially when used for non-life-threatening conditions.
I don't think there is 'a cell' that is lurking there that can do this. I think that Catherine has found a way to produce a cell that can behave this way," says Neil Theise of New York University Medical School.
If this turns out to be the case rather than the cell naturally occurring in bone marrow, it has tremendous implications from a patent perspective. Since you cannot patent a naturally occuring object, anyone who could reverse engineer the selection process would be able to produce these cells. But if it is the process itself that transforms otherwise non stem-cell behaving cells into MAPC's then process itself would be patentable and I believe even if you reverse engineered it you would be expected pay royalties. Since claims like "cell lines have been growing for almost two years . .
WOW, who would have thought that the fountain of youth, and a source of infinite free power would be announced on the same day?
Work for Change & GET PAID!
A stem cell has been found in adults that can turn into every single tissue in the body. It might turn out to be the most important cell ever discovered.
Until now, only stem cells from early embryos were thought to have such properties. If the finding is confirmed, it will mean cells from your own body could one day be turned into all sorts of perfectly matched replacement tissues and even organs.
If so, there would be no need to resort to therapeutic cloning - cloning people to get matching stem cells from the resulting embryos. Nor would you have to genetically engineer embryonic stem cells (ESCs) to create a "one cell fits all" line that does not trigger immune rejection. The discovery of such versatile adult stem cells will also fan the debate about whether embryonic stem cell research is justified.
"The work is very exciting," says Ihor Lemischka of Princeton University. "They can differentiate into pretty much everything that an embryonic stem cell can differentiate into."
Remarkable findings
The cells were found in the bone marrow of adults by Catherine Verfaillie at the University of Minnesota. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and though the team has so far published little, a patent application seen by New Scientist shows the team has carried out extensive experiments.
These confirm that the cells - dubbed multipotent adult progenitor cells, or MAPCs - have the same potential as ESCs. "It's very dramatic, the kinds of observations [Verfaillie] is reporting," says Irving Weissman of Stanford University. "The findings, if reproducible, are remarkable."
At least two other labs claim to have found similar cells in mice, and one biotech company, MorphoGen Pharmaceuticals of San Diego, says it has found them in skin and muscle as well as human bone marrow. But Verfaillie's team appears to be the first to carry out the key experiments needed to back up the claim that these adult stem cells are as versatile as ESCs.
Verfaillie extracted the MAPCs from the bone marrow of mice, rats and humans in a series of stages. Cells that do not carry certain surface markers, or do not grow under certain conditions, are gradually eliminated, leaving a population rich in MAPCs. Verfaillie says her lab has reliably isolated the cells from about 70 per cent of the 100 or so human volunteers who donated marrow samples.
Indefinite growth
The cells seem to grow indefinitely in culture, like ESCs. Some cell lines have been growing for almost two years and have kept their characteristics, with no signs of ageing, she says.
Given the right conditions, MAPCs can turn into a myriad of tissue types: muscle, cartilage, bone, liver and different types of neurons and brain cells. Crucially, using a technique called retroviral marking, Verfaillie has shown that the descendants of a single cell can turn into all these different cell types - a key experiment in proving that MAPCs are truly versatile.
Also, Verfaillie's group has done the tests that are perhaps the gold standard in assessing a cell's plasticity. She placed single MAPCs from humans and mice into very early mouse embryos, when they are just a ball of cells. Analyses of mice born after the experiment reveal that a single MAPC can contribute to all the body's tissues.
MAPCs have many of the properties of ESCs, but they are not identical. Unlike ESCs, for example, they do not seem to form cancerous masses if you inject them into adults. This would obviously be highly desirable if confirmed. "The data looks very good, it's very hard to find any flaws," says Lemischka. But it still has to be independently confirmed by other groups, he adds.
Fundamental questions
Meanwhile, there are some fundamental questions that must be answered, experts say. One is whether MAPCs really form functioning cells.
Stem cells that differentiate may express markers characteristic of many different cell types, says Freda Miller of McGill University. But simply detecting markers for, say, neural tissue does not prove that a stem cell really has become a working neuron.
Verfaillie's findings also raise questions about the nature of stem cells. Her team thinks that MAPCs are rare cells present in the bone marrow that can be fished out through a series of enriching steps. But others think the selection process actually creates the MAPCs.
"I don't think there is 'a cell' that is lurking there that can do this. I think that Catherine has found a way to produce a cell that can behave this way," says Neil Theise of New York University Medical School.
19:00 23 January 02
IF human reproductive cloning doesn't involve the destruction of human life, and IF human cloning is safe (no great chance of abnormalities), what's the problem then?
Anyway, the ability to farm perfectly good tissues and organs out of our own cells would be such a boon to medicine that I can't really see the possibility that it could also be used for reproductive cloning as being that big of a deal.
dinner: it's what's for beer
The article is kinda breathy, especially for New Scientist - but
I hate to disillusion you, but New Scientist is well-known for their sensationalism. If this were Nature, Science, or even Scientific American, Hemo's comment would make sense. Don't take me wrong I've enjoyed reading New Scientist for a number of years, but its niche is tabloid-style, scientific journalism. It is not a scientific journal.
If this research is valid, it is a huge breakthrough. But it means that human cloning will have to be argued for its own sake, rather than it somehow being necessary for growing spare kidneys. My concern with this is that Bush, et al, will use it to shut down cloning research altogether; they've never seemed to have any other use for cloning. On the other hand, it may allow clarity on the morality of cloning.
I have to second that. [mee too!]
I'm someone who relies on drugs everyday. If they weren't doing it in part for the money there would be no reason for them to continue.
I think medicine-for-profit is bad, and has denied me a lot of treatment I could have received thus far. The other half if the non-doctors making medical decisions [read: HMO].
Medicine-for-profit isn't good, but it's better than no medicine at all. Many drug companies are making moves to offer even their most expensive drugs to seniors for a low flat rate cost.
They do spend billions, if not trillions on reaserch. If they didn't, no one else would.
Get your Unix fortune now!
Although the majority of new drugs are indeed invented by drug companies looking for a profit, most of the basic science that goes into drug discovery is still done by university research laboratories that get their money from government grants.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
They're applying for a patent on the extraction and enrichment process, not the cells themselves, folks. Stem cells can't be patented, because the host person could simply claim prior use and blow the patent.
Virg
Calm down there, brother. In order to live forever, your vascular system, your organs, your immune system, your gastrointestinal system, and your nervous system must function properly. Even if they invent a way to replace all of these with fresh cells grown outside the body from time to time, it would be quite expensive to replace all of these items via surgery. Every third person in the US would have to be a doctor in order to meet the demand. (exaggeration?)
Growing the cells isn't the hard part, migrating them to the proper place in the body is the hard part. Think about your teeth: they grow at a specific point in your life and then start their gradual decay, there are a bunch of them, and surgery to insert 20-30 new ones into your jaw would take days. The problem is the body is designed for a distinct growth phase, and after that phase, certain tissues and structures are naturally incapable of spontaneous regeneration.
I think it would be some time before we move beyond figuring out how to duplicate the growth phase in a jar and duplicate it in the body, where we would presumably only want certain tissues to grow, etc. In the short to medium term, medicine's ability to keep you alive will be significantly increased, but you will be an old person with new parts, not a perpetually young person.
I bet skin and associated connective tissue should be relatively easy to replace, though, so you'll see a lot of actors in their 80's emulating young folks, just don't expect them to be able to do their own stunts.
personal attacks hurt, especially when deserved
First off, if the pun was intentional, very good work. Second, the work would be in the public domain. They're trying to patent their extraction and enrichment process, not the research itself. Third, your logic about cutting off funding for one type of science to push it to another has two main flaws:
1.) Reducing funding for space does not necessarily translate to extending funding for medical research.
2.) What if the next big medical discovery happens in the space program? There are so many examples of this that I could go on for days, but in the "pure" sciences (as opposed to applied sciences) very often discoveries are made from which the benefit is not readily apparent, but it soon becomes something that changes the world. Perhaps the cure for cancer comes from experiments done with materials in zero-G or vacuum environments. There's no way to know, so artificially limiting venues of research because they don't have obvious connections to a particular cause is very short-sighted.
Virg
There IS a cure for type 1 diabetes - recently in Edmonton, CA they "cured" about a dozen people by injecting islet cells (those that produce insulin) into the liver, along with some mild anti-immune drugs.
The anti-immune drugs are needed because the islet cells implanted are foreign.
The problem is that there aren't enough extractable islet cells in all viable cadavers in this country to cure even 1% of the diabetic population.
Under our current conservative presidency, stem-cell research involving embryos is at a near stand-still. (Only existing lines can be used, new ones cannot be created)
But if these stem cells can be trained to behave as islet cells, then my 13 year old son may well be effectively cured before he turns 20.
This is good news!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
What? Like Bananadine?
This is excellent science journalism. I'm glad to see the concerns of more skeptical scientists covered in such a balanced fashion. Most of the time, journalists, including those at the New Scientist, breeze past highly important caveats in favor of sensationalism - I'm sure we'll see this story repeated in Pro Life literature, for example, without qualifications. Kudos to Sylvia Westphal (author of the article.)
The fact that the claims being made appear on a patent application instead of in peer-reviewed research makes me extremely skeptical. Showing such a patent application to a member of the press - but not publishing - make me even more so. A great many people (I resist the temptation to post links) involved in Biotech make grandiose claims that they cannot really back up; the huge potential rewards have certainly led to compromises of scientific ethics in the past.
Just because a scientist is fishing for venture captialists does NOT mean that she is doing bad science; it does raise legitimate suspicion about her (Dr. Catherine Verfaillie, who did the work) research.
The "agelessness" and expression of unusual combinations of extracellular markers mentioned in the article are also features common to cancer cells. It is entirely possible that the process of extracting the bone marrow has merely selected out non-tumerogenic, precancerous cells. Such cells, which may very well substitute for stem cells anyway, but probably don't, might also spread through a mouse embryo into which they were injected.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
I think it's rather obvious that stel cells are eventually going to be conquered and put to wide usage in medicine... maybe in the near future, or maybe in the far future.
Right now I am 22.. going on 80. In my lifetime, I think that it will be possible for people to extend their lives out as far as they want to, if they have the money.
Basically, I see a time where the rich people will be able to remain ageless, living possibly hundreds of years. Meanwhile, average people would live a normal human life span.
Can you imagine what a social conflict something like this would make? In the past, there have been some very large social class differences, but imagine a gap where one group remains ageless, and another is jealously ageing and dying.
I think that I'm going to start saving my money now...
[...]what's the problem then?
El Santo Padre
If you fall off a building, go real limp, because maybe you'll look like a dummy and people will be like hey, free dummy
I just got out of a colloqium presented by one of the researchers and she was careful to point out that they do not have cells that can fully differentiate, just that they have cells that they have *so far* been able to turn into anything they want. They haven't tried everything yet.
May I point out that if medical science gets much better, we're going to need space research even more than we do now?
This is a common fallacy. No space-based expatration system is going to ship enough people off this planet to make the slightest bit of difference. There are 250,000 new people on this planet, ever single day. That is net of deaths, by the way. You'd have to be able to ship a quarter of a million people off this planet every single day (that's more than the population of New York City every year, by the way) just to keep population growth flat!
Space-based colonization is probably important to the long-term health of the species. And we need places to grow other than here. But the babies need to be born there, not here if space is going to be part of the solution.
While this would be an amazing breakthrough, the donation problem would still exist. See, as a diabetic (Type I), growing a replacement pancreas from my own DNA won't help me. The replacement would be just as broken and useless as the one currently propping up my liver (or holding it down, I'm terrible at anatomy). The only thing I get out of this research is plenty of free pancreas-shaped paperweights. ("What a lovely doorstop!" "Thanks, grew it myself.")
I would need one of the super stem cells from somebody with a working pancreas in order to grow a working one of my own. Presumably this wouldn't suffer from the usual tissue rejection problems of transplants.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Another reason to view it as a progressive stance is because, at least in the USA, the whole reason abortion was banned had nothing to do with religion at all. It was banned based on the efforts of the American Medical Association in the 19th century predicated by the new science of embryology, which showed more or less that human life began at conception. This was in contrast to the religious view that the human being did not become alive until quickening, when the fetus moved in the womb.
Some ageless cells are cancer.
...), but they aren't automatically cancerous.
Some are the sources of sperm and ova.
Some are probably the source of the blood, villi, skin, etc. (Yes, there are cells that aren't totipotent that are the sources here, but they don't have any obvious aging built in.)
If there are a few totipotent stem cells in an adult, it wouldn't be any big surprise. There probably won't be many of them, as they would be (are?) quite dangerous (one little mutation and
.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
It states in the article that certain people believe the cells are produced by the process, not that they already exist and are simply refined.
Is it just me, or was there news in the past year or so from people that had found that making cells dormant on minimal media (the same way they prepare cells for cloning) actually made them multipotent anyway? Does anyone else remember this?
toeslikefingers.com - because
No space-based expatration system is going to ship enough people off this planet to make the slightest bit of difference. There are 250,000 new people on this planet, ever single day. That is net of deaths, by the way.
250,000 people per day is 91.25 million people per year. According to this slide, European air travel was 541 million passengers in 1998, almost six times your figure for world population growth.