New Stem Cell Source - Your Bone Marrow

BoogieChile writes "ABC News is reporting that a team of researchers from Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre in Los Angeles, lead by Dr John Yu, are aiming to extract renewable stem cells from bone marrow - extracted from the patient him/herself - for a source of neural stem cells for treatment of brain cancers, Alzheimers and other neurological disorders. Problem solved! Yipee! New spinal column, anyone?" 'Course the story has no details - post anything else you can find below.

Comments

Replacement

[Anonymous Coward]

Would this be able to replace getting stem cells from Fetuses?

Re:Replacement

[japhyr777]

This is exactly the problem. The stem cells at this point are already specialized, and they essentially know how old they are. Hence the reason to use fetal stem cells that have not been programmed as to their task.

I find it strange that this is something new. My friends who are working with stem cells have known about research of this type for some time, and know the inherent weaknesses in these methods.

Leukemia

[jmertic]

I've heard about something like this with Leukemia patients. Basically, they can get you in remission, extract some stem cells from you, then use those stem cells for a bone marrow transplant for you later on. Someone elaborate on this if you know more, as I'm not a doctor and could be speaking out of my ass on this one.

Re:Leukemia

[_TheDoc_]

You are correct, and this is currently being used to treat a variety of patients with "bone marrow failure" from illnesses not necessarily limited to leukemias. The big jump here is that they're hoping they can trick the bone marrow stem cells into thinking they can become neural cells, something not in the original game plan. Of course even if that is possible, whether or not we can actually harness this power to treat disease is left to be discovered. Given the possibilities, however, it's something I'd keep my fingers crossed on.

Re:Leukemia

[zzendpad]

It's called an autologous bone marrow transplant (as opposed to an allogence transplant, from another donor). They basically take some of your bone marrow. Then they whack you with the strongest chemo they've got. It's used for multiple myeloma, Hodgkin's and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, breast, ovarian, and testicular cancer. The chemotherapies for these conditions affect your bone marrow greatly. So, they take some, whack you with the chemo, which hoses your bone marrow. Then they give you some of your old marrow back.

I was an Adriamynic, Bleomycin, Dicarbazine and Vinblastine for Hodgkin's lymphoma, this is a very common chemo for them to do an ABMT. I was spared this, though, because my bone marrow was already shot when they began treatment.

Re:Leukemia

[the_2nd_coming]

well now wait.....if they can perform a bonemarrow transplant from your own bone marrow stem cells, would that not be a uesfull technique for organ transplants? a year or so ago, a girl recived a kidney in NYC. she also got a bonemarrow transplant afterward. now the kidney is not identified as alien since the new marrow reset her factors or what have you.

would the same not hold true for a self doner transplant/replant?

Great news for Health

[Zerbey]

Unfortunately, the article goes into very little details such as:

Is extracting stem cells for bone marrow just as good as from fetuses? Can it be taken for a living patient? I have a big ethical problem with taking stem cells from an unborn baby, simply because a baby does not have the ability to consent to such a procedure.

I will be one of the first in line to donate bone marrow but will probably get rejected. Unfortunately, since I've lived in two countries no bloodbank will take my donation, even though I have no health problems. Hopefully, the law will be changed one day.

Re:Great news for Health

[swillden]

I guess what my true feeling is that, regardless of if the baby is a life yet or not, it is 100% the mothers personal choice, and not anyone else's business

It's certainly the mother's choice *before* she conceives. After she has made that choice, she still has a say, but the question gets more complicated.

And don't start man-bashing me. My view allows for extenuating circumstances to be considered, but my wife holds an unequivocal position: Unless the child is the result of rape/incest, or the life of the mother is endangered, a woman who chooses to engage in activities that lead to pregnancy is fully responsible for seeing that the child is born whole and healthy and is cared for and raised appropriately (adoption is a very good option). I also place the same responsibility on the father; my wife says that's true, but the woman should realize that it's easier for the man to walk away and should act accordingly.

Regardless of the details, the principle of the matter is that people must be responsible for their own actions. Men and women should not be allowed to make a baby and then to simply disavow all responsibility for it. Sorry, you make the choices, you get to deal with the natural consequences. Taking a human life is, generally, not an acceptable approach to dealing with consequences. Why should this situation be different?

The best course of action is for the mother to accept that she has screwed up the next few months of her life, deal with that, and give the child to someone else. There are *plenty* of people who are *eager* to take those children, love them, and raise them as their own.

THIS is why RESEARCH is important

[gosand]

I am going off the assumption that this story is true, but the fact remains that things like this have happened in other areas of science as well. RESEARCH allows scientists to innovate and come up with new techniques/treatments/solutions. Imagine that stem cell research had been stopped in the beginning because of "ethical" objections.

I think the same scenario can be applied to the tech world - if you stifle research, you stifle innovation. You stop someone from investigating digital security (DMCA) and you prevent security from progressing.

Re:THIS is why RESEARCH is important

[stratjakt]

What's moral and ethical in 'research' constantly evolves.

Back in university, I did a pretty thorough study and report on Frederick Banting and how he discovered insulin. I took a little field trip down to the University of Toronto and thumbed through some of his actual research logs.

Quick backstory:

He expirimented on dogs, basically trying to figure out what the (at the time unknown) internal secretion of the pancreas was, what it did, and how to extract it. His expiriments were to basically remove a big chunk of the pancreas, leaving only the cells that produce the digestive juices, and see what happened. The dogs got diabetic. He figured a way to extract the juice (insulin) from the pancreas, gave it to the now diabetic dogs, and they lived.

Anyhow. His logs are full of really shaky, obvious stuff. He was either an amazing scientist, or he was cooking the books. One test animal starts off as a cocker spaniel, and is later a german shepherd, for instance.

It's pretty much known that he and some assistants would scour the streets at night, abducting stray animals for their expiriments.

Now, back on topic. His behaviours were highly unethical in many ways by todays standards. I don't see any university letting you dognap animals to test out theories on them, let alone replacing a test animal because another died in surgery and not making any sort of note of that.

But, he discovered insulin. If we could go back and stop his unethical research, perhaps millions would still be dying of what is now a managable disease because of his work. Do the ends justify the means?

Might work, but...

[ToddScheetz]

Everything I've read indicates that every source of adult stem cells are at least partially differentiated. This means that they could be useful for a subset of the tissues within the body. Think of it in terms of a tree (in the computational sense). Embryonic stem cells are the root of the tree. They are pleuripotent, meaning that any cell type can be generated from them. At successively lower levels of the tree, more differentiation has taken place.

So, these adult stem cells from marrow could be useful for generating a subset of tissues. Most likely these are bone and marrow related. As an earlier poster pointed out, this could be VERY beneficial for leukemia. But the differentiation process does not appear to be reversible. At least yet!

-Todd

Cord Blood

[lameland]

There is already a replacement to the embryonic stem cells: stem cells from the blood in Umbilical (Sp?) cords. If the goverment or a group of hospitals came together and saved the blood from the umbilical cords of all babies born, there wouldn't be a need form embryonic stem cell research. There are a couple of companies already storing cord blood, one of them is cryo-cell

Re:Very Cool

[Christianfreak]

You get more reaction by playing "the Hitler card" though.

True, it is for reaction purposes :), but it really doesn't matter who's doing the killing, killing people because they aren't "productive members of society" is simply wrong. This country was founded on the right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. There isn't supposed to be any reason those rights are taking away. Who are we to decide that someone with Down Syndrome is still not productive, as an example I have a good friend who works with autistic children, she has kids that can't communicate but given the correct tools can write stories and paint pictures. Granted autism is a lot different from Down Syndrome but who's to say we won't discover a way to communicate with people have the disease and find that they aren't as incohenrent as we thought?

If we go down that slippery slope we aren't coming back. Who decides who is a productive member of society? The Bush Administration? I don't hate Bush (voted for him in fact) but I don't trust him to make that sort of descision. And then, where does it stop? Do we just kill people who have Down Syndrome? What about people so mentally retarded they can't communicate ... so all the people who can't communicate well that includes people that are deaf, mute and blind ... okay lets get rid of anyone born blind or deaf or mute because its obvious they aren't going to be "productive". Okay well then what about people that are partially blind, people that have to wear corrective lenses, that would include a lot of computer people (myself included!). Where does it end?

Its obvious from your sig that you probably don't believe in a higher power so I won't give the standard "playing God" argument, but I think that even you agree that if we start taking away the right to life from "non-productive people" we then have a precedent to take it away from anyone since "non-productive" is very subjective.

Religious reasons aside that's the problem I have with abortion, it makes society as a whole respect life even less than they already do. It's not really "alive" right? But it is alive, its made up of living tissue and created by other living things! And even if you believe its not, abortion still takes the right to life away from someone who would have had it otherwise.

What happened to regeneration?

[Anonymous Coward]

Stem cells seem very crude, I think the superior approach is to isolate what proteins are responsible for regeneration and use gene therapy to enable them or inject a protein into the wound. Why pull out specific stem cells when any cell can become one?

Just back from Lexis

[bezuwork's friend]

This article reminds me of a case:

Moore v. Regents of University of California, 51 Cal. 3d 120 (CA Supreme Ct. 1990). (I know, bluebook format not followed)

This involved a guy who had some cells removed. He gave consent, but the doctors did not reveal to him their interest in the cells. Turns out that after research with his cells, they developed products worth millions, IIRC. The CA Supreme found for the university despite the doctors having violated a disclosure law.

Re:Reuters on yahoo...

[daoine]

No, I don't think it's distorted at all -- it's simply not going into all the detail. People who go through fertility treatments often have a bunch o' embryos pre-created. Once they're pregnant, they don't need the extra ones. The process of creating one embryo at a time is incrdibly costly -- the people going in for treatment know ahead of time that many will be created, not all will be used. That's a choice they make.

This is not out of sync with reality. There's an embryo that exists that could either by biohazard or science. If the parents say 'hey - give it to science' then off they go. The point of the scenario is willing donation -- which does occur.

And I find it hard to believe that the above process is more difficult to follow through on then finding an 1 cm fetus in an abortion.