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Stem Cell Therapy Causes Tumors
SpaceAdmiral writes, "Using human embryonic stem cells, researchers have cured a Parkinson's-like disease in rats. Unfortunately, the Parkinson's cure causes brain tumors." From the first article: "...10 weeks into the trial, [University of Rochester researchers] discovered brain tumours had begun to grow in every animal treated... By definition, human embryonic stem cells have the almost mythical, immortal power to grow and divide indefinitely as they become the various tissues that make up the body. As a result, scientists have always known that any stem cell therapy could result in an uncontrolled growth of cells that could give rise to cancer."
Why not use adult stem cells? There also the cord blood research to add in, as well. So far, all the research I've been reading suggest these to be the best direction to take and such research is funded at the federal level. And as a bonus, has no real ethics baggage associated with it!
Does anybody else find it slightly disturbing that the "Related Links" section has a "Compare prices on biotech" link?
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What are you trying to sell me today,
Fill in your four or five-letter word of wisdom here _ _ _ _ _.
This is the same thing, in reverse. It's an interesting, frustrating animal result in a pretty good journal, not a crashing doom for stem cell research.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
established.
Because by the second day of incubation any cells that have undergone reversion mutation give rise to revertant colonies like rats leaving a sinking ship, then the ship sinks.
...working with stem cells. There at two major practical problems. The first one is maintaining them -- you look at em wrong and the differentiate (BAM, no more stem cells, just some muscle, nerve, epidermal, etc. cells). The second is that BECAUSE they are so good at proliferating, they are prone to turn into tumors when introduced into the body. That isn't a new concern, it's just interesting that the research described here has actually observed that concurrently with alleviation of the targeted disease state (neurodegeneration in this case). I suspect the "fix" to this is already being developed, since the tissue they are destined to replaced in the brain is usually non-dividing tissue, it may be possible to engineer an 'off-switch' into the cells, whereby cell division could be permenantly disrupted (the tissue created by the stem cells would function as normal). This shouldn't be to hard, but does add to the effort already necessary to even generate patient-specific stem cells. More research!
I could just imagine a pointy haired boss in a dilbert like biotech firm talking up the tumors as an extra "feature" - and make the parkinsons patients pay extra for it.
This is a partial success. The therapy did what it was supposed to do - it cured the Parkinson's Disease. It's just that the side effects are worse than the disease at this point. But that's a whole lot better news than it not working at all.
Everybody with even a modest understanding of how scientific research goes knows that the road from interesting phenomena to practical application is usually a long and complex one, and that the claims of instant cures for everything from heart attack to spinal cord injuries were exaggerated for the purposes of winning political debate. But when a trial has a partial success, in my view that is further encouragement to continue research.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
...And biology research has been proven to cause disease and death in rats...
Seriously though... It doesn't necessarily follow that the cure (especially a cure that is still in its infancy - 'scuse the joke) is better than the disease, and the idea is to do the research now so that we can use the stem cells to cure terrible illnesses (and repair missing limbs and all the rest of it) without the side effect of the stem cells going out of control.
Of course medicine has side effects. Many of the drugs given to a person on chemo and radio therapy are to keep them alive while the actual cure goes ahead and kills their cancer. As yet we are still learning how to control the stem cells, and they are doing what cells do when uncontrolled: making more of themselves and living life to the full. We'll get better at controlling them if we research them. That's why it's called stem cell research...
Because Stem Cells have been politicised left right and sideways.
Right, Embryonic Stem Cells == Baby-killing.
Left, The right want cancer patients to DIE to prove a point.
Welcome to politics in the 21st century. They both put things in the most extreme way possible.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The human body is an example of really crap evolutionary programming. Horrible spagetti code with no thought to make things modular. New stuff tacked in using old variables. Functions with multiple purposes.
So when you debug one thing, something else brakes.
God was a terrible programmer. But I guess that's what you get with a tight 7 day timeframe.
Scientific American had an article in june talking about stem cells and their role in some cancers.. specificly that some cancers are caused by stem cells in "normal" people going awry. From june SciAm: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000B1BE D-0C0A-1498-8C0A83414B7F0000&sc=I100322
Pretty interesting read, IMHO.
Did't these scientists pay attention when they were kids?
Tyrell: The facts of life. To make an alteration in the evolvment of an organic life system is fatal. A coding sequence cannot be revised once it's been established.
Roy: Why not?
Tyrell: Because by the second day of incubation, any cells that have undergone reversion mutations give rise to revertant colonies like rats leaving a sinking ship. Then the ship sinks.
Roy: What about EMS recombination.
Tyrell: We've already tried it. Ethyl methane sulfonate as an alkylating agent a potent mutagen It created a virus so lethal the subject was dead before he left the table.
Roy: Then a repressive protein that blocks the operating cells.
Tyrell: Wouldn't obstruct replication, but it does give rise to an error in replication so that the newly formed DNA strand carries the mutation and you've got a virus again. But, uh, this-- all of this is academic. You were made as well as we could make you.
Vote Democrat... because the current Republican administration wants people to have Parkinson's disease.
Vote Republican... because Democrats want to give you cancer.
Vote Libertarian... because the government shouldn't be deciding for you if you want cancer or Parkinson's.
Where exactly did they obtain "human fetal midbrain tissues"?
Well now... IANASTR, but I'll go out on a limb and say "from the midbrains of human fetuses", with a pretty high level of confidence in my answer.
I cringe in disgust at how far this slippery slope is progressing...
What slippery slope? We have a significant portion of the population that deliberately aborts unwanted pregnancies. If someday we benefit from the use of their medical waste to cure Parkinson's or Alzheimer's or even just slow down plain ol' ageing - Good for me, good for you, good for everyone!
This doesn't require any sort of moral relativism to accept. It can provide nearly miraculous benefits for no (extra) cost. Sounds like a win/win, even if you take the FUD spewed by its worst opponents (tempered by a small dose of reality).
The fact that it causes tumors I consider an exceedingly inconvenient (if somewhat predictable) complication, but one we can hopefully overcome with continued research.
As an aside, I also fully encourage continued research into adult stem cells... Though not for any squeamish "oooh, no dead babies" line of BS. Nope - Simply for the far more pragmaic reason that tissue rejection doesn't present a problem after the cure itself takes effect.
Not every attempt at something new works the way you want the first time. The first heart transplant patient didn't live very long. The first medications for aids didn't work as well as what is out there now. That's why this kind of research is done on rats. *cough*eatshitpeta*cough* If medical research stopped the first time there was this kind of result, we'd all still be dying of yellow fever and polio. There are entirely too many people getting their shorts in a twist over this. Sheesh!
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
"Take this object, but beware, it carries a terrible curse"
"Ooo, that's bad"
"But it comes with a free frogurt!"
"That's good"
"The frogurt is also cursed"
"That's bad"
"But you get your choice of toppings!"
"That's good"
"The toppings contain potassium benzoate..."
I really hope I'm wrong but the cord blood mentality seems like an extrememly high pressure sales pitch giving the feeling that the whole process is bogus.
I was really shocked when the pitch was given to me and you literally have 30 minutes to decide if you want to store this once in a lifetime thing "for your childs health". "Don't you want what's best for your child?"
By not paying the $2500 and $250 yearly fee, they make you feel like a bad parent and you've signed the death warrant for your kid that isn't even 24 hours old.
You can be aware of cord blood before you're a parent but there is a switch inside of you that flips the moment you see a progeny that contains part of your code using it's own life support system. That vulnerability is preyed upon by the cord blood companies, hospital staffed photographers, and hospital doctors because "The hospital doctors are better equipped and knowledgable than your own pediatrician." My guess is that they use that pitch to prey on people who haven't picked out a pediatrician prior to delivery.
I can understand people that have a genetic pre-disposition for bad health would want this but I question the validity of the methods of storage, insurance regarding it, possiblilty of `visits` to make sure they still have it, and that the cord blood stored is in fact yours.
We know for a fact that there are cases where stored sperm did not belong to the donors but to the doctor or the technician responsible of storing it. Obvisouly, there have been cases where labeling was an issue. This would be disastrous in a cord blood case if it were a labeling issue.
Another scam (not calling cord blood a scam, I just don't approve of their sales tactics and I question their validity) is Stride Rite shoes. They want to have your kids in shoes before they learn to walk because "you don't want to have your kids feets deformed, do you?" It's funny that they have their own `certification` for Fitting Specialists, like Microsoft has their own certification for System Engineers. I have seen parents with crawling babies wearing Stride-Rite shoes and I know a former 'Fit Specialist' so I know that their tactics work.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
Type 1 Diabetes, also known as Juvenile-Onset Diabetes currently has no cure, and stem cell research is currently the best hope. Testing blood glucose levels through finger sticks and taking insulin through multiple shots per day or an insulin pump is a poor treatment - with many long-term side effects and the chance EVERYDAY of having a low-blood glucose episode that may cause lose of consciousness and/or seizures. 1 in 600 kids worldwide develop Type 1 Diabetes and they did NOTHING to cause it - which means the incidence is MUCH higher than AIDS. Stop listening to the christian right and start reading actual medical & scientific journals.
http://hotair.com/archives/2006/10/23/video-claire -mccaskills-michael-j-fox-ad/
I hate to admit it, but Ann Coulter was right! Liberals love to show us victims that tell us things like war is bad and stem cells are good and don't disagree with them, they're victims. So here's the science--Michael J Fox can now have Parkinson's--and cancer! Bravo!
The ethical problem is that, if the raw material is "medical waste" and the results are successful, how long will it take before the demand out-strips the supply and people start looking for ways intentional generate the raw material? I'm already concerned about the outsourcing of pharmaceutical testing to thrid world countries - whether the test subjects are actually giving informed consent. Are we going to find out in ten or twenty years that these new wonder drugs are being produced by intentionally impregnating women and then harvesting their fetuses?
Before you respond that I'm being ridiculous, do a little research into the blood diamonds mined in Africa or children forced into the sex industry in southeast Asia. People will be "farmed" if there is a market for it, and it cna be hidden behind enough shell corporations that the big biotech firms have plausible deniability.
We should ban it immediately and never pursue beneficial medical treatments again that Jesus didn't know about.
Think of it this way: look at how many bits the human DNA has. Each nucleotid pair is one of 4 possible values, so 2 bits. A human has about 3 billion pairs. So on the whole about 750 megabytes or so.
I dunno about you, but I'm thoroughly impressed. _You_ try programming a human in 750 MB, and then you can criticize. I'm talking not only the brain (which is a feat by itself), but also the whole organism there, including immune system, self-healing, metabolism, etc.
I don't even know if it's unstructured. What we have here is some people trying to use that stuff without knowing what it really does or how it was supposed to be used. It's sorta like watching the client PHB trying to just drag and drop a button on a form himself, and then wondering why it doesn't work like he just assumed it would. ("Hey, I dropped a "Save" button there and it doesn't actually save when I click it!") You can't really blame it on the original programmer if it doesn't work that way.
So if I were mean, I'd up the ante and also say "and program it so it also works when some clueless guy later tries to use a human cell in a mouse, in a way that was never in the specs." But let's be generous and skip that. Just program a human in 750 MB, no matter how.
What _our_ engineers (and I'm one, so I'm allowed to criticize) manage today in 750 MB is a stupid text editor or a spreadsheet. We're past even just structured programming. Now we pack everything in layers upon layers of frameworks, EJBs, factories, decorators, managers (the pattern, not the PHB), events, SOAP, JMS, etc, just because it's _fashionable_ to have one more buzzword on the resume. And, oh, if it's Java, let's add add a layer of introspection too, because it's become soooo unfashionable to just write "myObject.getID()" instead of cracking the class open the class at runtime and reaching in its internals.
Let me stress again: this crap doesn't even have to do with OOP or with structured programming any more, and in fact sometimes _prevents_ proper OOP. Project after project I run into crap designs where you _can't_ use OOP, e.g. define a simple subclass of something, because for example there's an EJB layer in the way and the other end wouldn't know how to deserialize your modified objects. Or because all the data objects are generated from some XML definitions -- and I don't just mean the stuff that'll get persisted in the database, but really internal data objects -- just because someone thought it's _cooler_ to write an XML and run a third-party generator than to just write the fucking member definitions and ask Eclipse to make getters and setters for them. And as a result you can't even attach the relevant methods to them, like you learned in the OOP classes, like attaching a "findChild()" method where it belongs in the tree node, because it would get overwritten in the next build when those objects are generated from XML.
Engineering used to be about having a problem and designing the best solution to it. E.g., you have a river to cross, and you consider whether it's best to build a bridge, or a tunnel, or a ferry, and pick the simplest and cheapest solution that solves the problem. Now we're at the stage where we want to have a "suspension bridge" buzzword on the resume, and we'll cheerfully dig a canal just to have something to build that bridge over. Or detour the road through 3 states to the side so we can find a gorge to build the bridge over. Must have that precious buzzword even if it kills the project. That's not engineering, that's marketting and playing.
Anyway, at this rate we'll soon need a 750 MB framework just to pass the parameters around.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
You are certainly correct that there are people within the medical community far more qualified to *understand* issues of medical ethics.
However, with equal certainty, such experts are *not* qualified to make final decisions on these questions. They represent no-one, were elected by no-one, and are accountable to no-one outside their medical specialty.
Whatever you may think of politicians - and believe me, I probably share most of your views - they are nevertheless the only people in a position to make legitimate ethical decisions that bind us as a society. This is almost axiomatically true, because in a democracy, legitimacy comes from the people as represented in the legislature.
So the medical professionals are needed for their expertise, and the politicians are needed for their legitimacy. Medical professionals can't take over this role. What needs to happen is for the two groups to work together.
Whether the U.S. system of government remains structurally capable of allowing this to happen remains an open question, of course.
-Graham
So they are "benign," which while a term of art, is very misleading to layfolks.
A benign growth in the brain can be a serious problem. But benign growths in most other places are, for the most part, benign given modern surgical techniques.
A tumor just plain sucks.
This is early research. A therapy that causes benign tumors is much more easily fixable than one that causes cancer. In particular, there is probably no DNA damage involved here.
In fact, this effect actually may turn out to be very useful for making stem cells work.
Okay. So what exactly are Stem Cells?
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Stem Cells are "un-programmed" cells which can become any kind of cell in an organism. They are full of possibility! --As the organism grows, cells branch away (from the stem) to differentiate into eyeball cells, fingernail cells, knee cap or elbow cells. The medical community is excited about them, because you can use stem cells with their vast potential to regrow damaged organs. How wonderful!
The 'Big Problem', as it has been sold by the media and medical P.R. firms works like this. .
You can only get stem cells from babies or fetuses, where they still exist and have not yet differentiated. Why? Because, we are told, a cell once it has branched off to become an eyeball or an elbow, once it has differentiated, cannot de-differentiate. It's stuck as an eyeball or an elbow cell. Thus doctors and researchers must go to the source. Babies.
Horrors! What an effective way to keep people divided and in a constant state of uproar.
The only trouble is that it's a lie. Eyeball and elbow cells can de-differentiate. You can recreate stem cells.
--Observe the humble salamander which can regrow whole limbs if they are cut off. New cells split from existing ones and are able to grow into new elbows, arms and fingers. How do they do this? There isn't a storehouse of stem cells hiding somewhere in the salamander waiting to be used in an emergency. Nope. What happens is that when the salamander is injured, at the site of the injury the cells regress into a fibroblastic state, and then emerge as stem cells which then proceed to form the new parts required to re-grow the entire limb. Elbow cells, arm and finger cells. No dead babies required. Cool.
Interestingly, it is also observed in salamanders that when you attach electrodes to the creature's nose and tail, a charge can be measured. Apparently the nose is negative and the tail positive. Okay. And when you injure the creature by cutting off one of its legs, that charge reverses for a period of time until the healing process is well underway.
Um. Okay. That's kind of weird.
At the site of the injury itself, the DC electric potentials also do other strange things, and the cells exhibit behaviors directly related to those changes. Curiouser and curiouser.
And guess what? Humans exhibit similar DC electric traits. The currents are extremely small, but they are there. They are not the same as those in salamanders, but then human cells also behave differently. We can't re-grow limbs, for one thing. But at the site of an injury, our cells also go into a fibroblastic state. Cells stop being elblo and toenail cells and become fibroblastic cells which form into scar tissue.
But what happens when you apply DC currents from an external source? Well, it's odd, but the cells react. Human cancer cells, for instance, start to grow much, much faster. Hm. What else can happen? Well, lots of things, apparently. The human body, and in fact, all living tissues in all creatures, react in a variety of ways to micro-electric currents.
Chinese accupuncture, for instance, is almost certainly based on this. --A metal needle is inserted into a key point on the body, it is set to rotating, (cutting through the Earth's magnetic field, thus creating a small current), and the body reacts in some manner. Place the needles correctly and a variety of different healing effects can be obtained by accupuncture doctors.
Cool. What else can be achieved?
Well, human cells in a fibroblast state can be made to de-differentiate. They can be turned into stem cells. Hold on. Say what? That's not supposed to be able to happen! We're supposed to be in an uproar over dead babies. We're supposed to be distracted through a permanent state of in-fighting amongst ourselves so that we don't have the energy to ever be free of the control systems holding us fixed into place.
Has anybody mentioned this to the medical