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First Embryonic Stem Cell Clinical Trial Imminent
An anonymous reader writes "California-based Geron has announced that the first embryonic stem cell trial may be in the not-so-distant future. Tom Okarma, Geron's CEO, recently announced that the company will be seeking permission from the FDA to begin clinical trials. From the article: 'Geron's plan is to treat people that have acute spinal injuries with oligodendrocyte progenitor cells grown from human ESCs. Oligodendrocyte cells support neurons in the brain and spine by sheathing them in myelin, a fat that helps neurons to transmit signals.'"
...there's nothing to sheathe here.
(I'm sorry.)
"I seem to have mastered a certain amount of control over physical reality."
I believe this was the result of propostion 71 that was passed in California last year. It allocated $3 billion over a period of ten years to fund stem cell research! Way to go California :)
http://religiousfreaks.com/ http://psychicfreaks.com/I don't really see that as a benefit. If I'm only drinking beer for the flavour, then I'm just as happy with non-alcoholic beer. If I'm drinking beer for the alcohol, then stem-cell enhanced alcohol resistance is not my friend; the ability to repair liver damage however....
Lose: misplace or fail || Loose: not bound together
"Personally, I think we should just cut to the chase and start growing humans specifically to harvest the organs. Why not? As long as they don't achieve consciousness, what's the harm?
We already have those. They are called motorcyclists. Emergencey response teams don't call them "organ doners" for nothing.
Some say he is made with ascii, others that he is eyeballed daily by millions. All we know is, he is known as the Sig
With the babyboomers being the first generation (in history) to be at the threshold where science and technology is unlocking the secrets of how cells work and with the increased competition, it is no longer simply okay to accept that when you reach your early 40's that you can be let go because there are younger workers able to do your job (simply because you suffer fron the what is now "natural" aging process)
t ransfer pills and much like todays generation (with ipods, pc's,internet etc.) not be able to imagine a time when this technology did not exist.
With these new upcoming technologies (stem cells, bio/nanotech) we will be able to, in the next couple of dacades, to slow and reverse the aging process so that in this competitive world enviroment, you won't be tossed out on the junk heap when you reach 40.
The only way this is going to happen is for people to push science and technological research forward and demand that this be done (instead of, say invading other countries).
Remeber, in the future, when we can reprogram cells and easily as we write programs today, people growing up will be taking their nano-reguvination/enhaced intelegence/memory/internet-connect-mind-thought-
Ethanol does have an effect on transmission (specifically it reduces excitability and increases the effectiveness of GABA, an inhibitory neurotransmitter), but those are effects on action potential generation. Myelination from oligodendrocytes just increases the ability of an already generated action potential to reach the end of the axon and cause synaptic activity. So the oligodendrocytes' effect is sort of like plugging holes in a leaking pipe, whereas the effect of alcohol is more like decreasing the chance that water will actually enter the pipe in the first place. Which is to say: alcohol's work is already done before the myelination comes into play, so increasing the latter won't much affect the former. (IAA neuroscientist, but admitedly this isn't my area of expertise so I may be slightly wrong).
But what I'm really afraid of is that, despite whatever scientific significance such a trial could have, the religious right will immediately jump on this and squelch it without giving it any sort of chance. At least, hopefully, we can get the scientific advances later from countries that are more willing to do the research.
What frightens me is that even with proven advances in adult stem cells, some people squelch it for research that has inherent problems with the body rejecting the cells. These people claim that anti-science religious groups are attacking them. Huh?
Sure that's a third eye on your elbow, but it's a feature, for free too.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
My fellow republicans, it is time we got out our pitchforks and torches. The mad scientists are going too far, and frankly, I think we all know we're overdue for some lynchings. God didn't put us on this earth to suck cells out of unborn babies to heal the sick, but he gave us fire for good reason, and it is time we used some of it!
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
I know that our pharmacological community is more concerned with making a buck and keeping us sick then actually curing diseases.
That's a pretty ridiculous thing to say. Yes, pharmaceutical companies want to make a buck, but scientists are human beings and many of them are doing their best to create the best drugs they can to help people. To think that they're intentionally withholding drugs or not trying to cure diseases to keep making money is simply ridiculous and paranoid.
There are tons of people working to cure cancers, Parkinson's, AIDS, Alzheimer's, and other diseases. If you think otherwise, you don't know anything about medical research. The fact that these things aren't yet cured is not from a lack of trying. There's still a great deal about the human body we don't know. There's tons about stem cells we don't understand. The human body is so amazingly comlpex, it's incredible that we can do the things we can do already.
Remember, drug companies and researchers came up with a number of vaccines for diseases that no longer plague us. Bacterial infections are fatal about 1/1000th as often as they used to be, thanks to the work of drug companies.
Don't get me wrong, they're not charity organizations and I'm not trying to make them out to be that. They're trying to make money for their stockholders, and that's their job. The people who work for them are trying to cure diseases, though. That's their job.
An interesting example is as follows:" A fluorescence-activated cell sorter. A cell passing through the laser beam is monitored for fluorescence. Droplets containing single cells are given a negative or positive charge, depending on whether the cell is fluorescent or not. The droplets are then deflected by an electric field into collection tubes according to their charge. Note that the cell concentration must be adjusted so that most droplets contain no cells and flow to a waste container together with any cell clumps."
The empirical scientists that correctly implement such challenging procedures are rarely mentioned.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
"Yes, pharmaceutical companies want to make a buck, but scientists are human beings and many of them are doing their best to create the best drugs they can to help people. To think that they're intentionally withholding drugs or not trying to cure diseases to keep making money is simply ridiculous and paranoid."
Well...
I'll certainly give the scientists their due. The question becomes how much control does the company have over the directions the scientists' research takes them?
Here's sort of how I see it: I have no doubts that the drug companies are hard at work attempting to develop an AIDS vaccine. Are they attempting to work on a cure? Because, let's face it, there are far more people who are concerned about getting AIDS and would like a vaccine than there are people who have AIDS. I'm sure the research that goes into an AIDS vaccine will immeasurably help to develop a cure. But which pill would you expect to see on the market first--the cure or the vaccine?
"But Genentech does not want to license the drug for this use as it is. No sir, they will only sell a 'repackaged' version for 100X the original price. A real 'eye opener'."
Actually, that's not really it at all, but thanks for playing. Avastin has been used by retinal specialists to treat wet macular degeneration (and presumed ocular hisoplasmosis syndrome, but that affects far fewer people so there aren't any real studies done with it as yet.) When retinal specialists got the idea to use an angiogenesis inhibitor to treat MD, the real problem was the size of the Avastin molecule. They were concerned that it was too large to penetrate the retinal membrane and thus wouldn't be effective against MD. Genentech immediately went back to the drawing board and developed Lucentis which is a smaller molecule that can more easily penetrate the retinal membrane.
In the meantime, retinal specialists have been using Avastin with some success, but it's believed that Lucentis will be more successful because of the smaller molecule size. Genentech doesn't license the drug for a purpose, the FDA approves it for a purpose. The fact is that there have been no large scale trials with Avastin. The largest I know of is this one by Avery et.al. which had only 79 participants. But now that Lucentis is out, there are official trials being done with it and assuming it passes (which it appears all but certain that it will), it will probably be significantly better at treating MD than Avastin.