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Breakthrough In Stem Cell Culturing
Science Daily reports that for the first time, human embryonic stem cells have been cultured under chemically controlled conditions without the use of animal substances, which is essential for future clinical uses. "Now, for the first time, we can produce large quantities of human embryonic stem cells in an environment that is completely chemically defined," says professor Karl Tryggvason, who led the study at Sweden's Karolinska Institutet. "This opens up new opportunities for developing different types of cells which can then be tested for the treatment of disease."
Pah! Finally, those uncultured stem cells will learn the finer arts of high society!
"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams [...]."
Along with the recent news of the creation of an artificial cell, it seems like biotechnology is the truly "hot" field these days.
They can find the cure for alzheimer's before I really have to worry about it.
We remove some of the ethical concerns that go with stem cell research. This should go a long way in advancing medical science.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Best of all; it happened in Europe, so we don't have to worry about some self-serving corporate trying to patent 'Chemically Controlled Stem Cell Culturing' to make $$$ for themselves at the cost of all humanities medical advancement.
With stems cells down the road. Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer, aka therapeutic cloning. (If you thought people had moral problems with using embryonic stem cells man they're going to flip out over that one.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Some important background that this article doesn't specifically mention (another one I read did), in 2008, that same lab had shown this was possible with mouse stem cells. That's not to knock them, just it's important to point out that these things don't just come from out of the blue, nor does biology move as quick as we would like. This group has been working on showing this goes on in human stem cells for at least 2 years, who knows how long it took them to find this out in mice, or narrow down this one specific protein. Those years between when they discovered it in mice and showing it in humans probably also represents a lot of work. Science is hard.
I would guess that the next step, maybe one they're already working on, is to show that induced pluripotent stem cells can be cultured on this same protein. IPsC are when they take cells from your own body and make them revert back to a similar state to embryonic stem cells, to where they can then be turned into any cell type you want (the advantage there being they're your cells so you wouldn't get tissue rejection like you would with embryonic stem cells.)
Three big barriers to using IPsC for therapy were/are 1. that they were made using viral transfection of cancer-causing genes, 2. culturing them required feeder cells which the article describes why that's bad, and 3. it's hard to completely differentiate a population of pluripotent cells into one cell type you're trying to get. There have been some breakthroughs on 1, last I heard a group had shown you can just culture with modified proteins to induce pluripotency. This is a breakthrough on 2. Unfortunately 3 might be harder. You want to be sure you've differentiated all the stem cells before you put them into a patient. If you inject stem cells into a patient, they're going to get one of the worst types of tumors: teratomas, so you want to be absolutely sure you've gotten them all. And each different cell type seems to differentiate in different ways. We might figure out how to turn stem cells completely into skin cells, but that may not help us learn how to turn a culture of stem cells into brain cells.
Nonetheless, this was an important 2 part solution to a barrier to using stem cells to their full potential. Double kudos to them, they've made a real contribution here.
I watched the decline happen with my father-in-law, and the days when he was totally lucid may have been the worst of all for him, because he could see his situation and understand the terrible things he'd said and felt in his less lucid days. The disease was a daily torture for the man, and I know that under a similar diagnosis and with the current state of medicine as it is, my own choice would be more sudden and immediate.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Patent application title: COMPOSITION AND METHOD FOR ENABLING PROLIFERATION OF PLURIPOTENT STEM CELLS
Authors: Karl Tryggvason, Anna Domogatskaya, Sergey Rodin, a subset of the authors of the paper referenced at the end of TFA. I don't know enough about stem cells to say that the patent application is identical to TFA, but it's on at least highly similar subject matter. Prof. Tryggvason has over 30 patents as per his bio on the Biolamina corporate website, a company he co-founded. As a scientist currently trying to bring some academic research out of the lab and into deployment, I can tell you that this is just how things are done. It isn't perfect, but without the protection of a patent it's hard to see any company willingly expose itself to the massive risk and cost of developing, producing, testing, and marketing Prof. Tryggvason's work without the profit motive that patents protect.
Sorry, but this is not a significant breakthrough. Not going xeno-free has been an issue if convenience, not capability. Invitrogen has been selling a xeno-free matrix for hESC growth for 1-2 years now. I've used it and it works just fine. Replacing all of the animal components in hESC media is costly but conceptually pretty easy. Furthermore, I'd imagine that all of the stem-cell companies (Geron, Advanced Cell, and Novocell) w/ therapies moving towards the clinic already have their own proprietary xeno-free conditions.
There goes one of my excuses for running away from fights now :-(
Otherwise it could run a complaints desk.
I'm sorry to hear about your loss, but you can't really know if this really is the case or not. Would it have really led to this advance significantly earlier? or would it have just been slightly earlier? or perhaps there would have been little to no change?
Anyway, the Bush "ban" was actually initiated by Clinton administration and it only prevented embryonic stem cell research from receiving US federal funding if it involved the destruction of embryos. Adult stem cell research and privately funded research has been perfectly legal the whole time.
Research isn't like engineering where you can throw tons of money at a problem and make it go much faster. You can cultivate a good environment for research, and in this way the ban may have caused some harm, but throwing more resources at such research doesn't scale in the same way as say going to the moon or developing the atomic bomb, where all the fundamental research was done and all that was needed was a lot of engineering and elbow grease. In other words, 8 years more US federal funding does not translate into advances occurring 8 years earlier.
Plus, this discovery was made in Europe and not in the US. The US isn't the center of the universe.
There is a great temptation to blame our woes on the malice or incompetence of others, but one should not give in to this temptation unless there is very good proof for it.
US Federal funds were cut off from embryonic stem cell research by Bush in 2001. That was a big change, since US Federal funding is a giant part of global medical research. The US and its Federal funding that's no risk to the private corps that benefit from its results is indeed the center of the medical research universe. In 2001, embryonic stem cells were the most likely kind to produce results. That was slowed a very great deal until the funding was allowed again last year. And now just a year later is this breakthru. Showing just how valuable throwing money at this problem is, compared to denying it money.
In the real world, cutting off stem cell funding in 2001 was an epic setback to the medical research. And in the real world, real people who could benefit suffered without it.
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make install -not war
Sorry, this is incorrect. Bush allowed federal funds to be used (for the first time) for research on existing stem cell lines, but not on new ones.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
The existing embryonic stem cell lines in 2001 were believed to be unusable after contamination by mouse cells.
The reality is that Bush succeeded in crippling stem cell research until his ban was lifted last year.
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make install -not war
If embryonic stem cell research hadn't been banned by Republicans pandering to theocrats and drug corps for so long, this technique that finally unleashes stem cells for therapies might have been developed 8 years earlier.
I'm a cell biologist, a staunch democrat, and was astounded at how stupid Bush's actions were, but that's not exactly fair.
First and foremost, this is not a startling new discovery, the same group published a paper in 2008 showing that -mouse- embryonic stem cells grew fine on this one protein. The basic discovery didn't take place until just prior to 2008, the federal funding rules didn't affect mouse embryonic stem cell research obviously. It could have been discovered in mouse embryonic stem cells even with the funding rules under Bush, by chance it was not. Had we discovered it in mouse in, say, 2003, and then been unable to show it went for human cells too, that would be another case.
Second, embryonic stem cells being cultured without feeder layers would not have been much cause for hope, major barriers to treatment still existed and continue to exist outside of how to grow the cells. Research into overcoming those barriers would not have been directly impacted by the ban.
One barrier was that mbryonic stem cells were never very promising for therapeutic purposes, since you can't get ESC from a non-embryo patient. ESC from anything other than a clone could face tissue rejection issues. Within the last 3 years though, induced pluripotent stem cells were discovered/made, which would overcome those problems. I don't believe the research that went into that was significantly impacted by the ban, since again the mechanism was first identified in mouse. If your friend died last year, that would have already been discovered and is in my mind is the biggest breakthrough on spinal cord injuries we've ever seen. Recently, they've even done it without viral transfection.
Another barrier, and possibly the biggest one remaining, is that with this method or without, we still aren't 100% capable of taking a plate of stem cells or pluripotent cells and turning them all into neurons to repair the spinal cord. Last I heard, we could get most of them to mature, but not 100% to turn from stem cell to neuron. That's unacceptable for therapy. Any undifferentiated cells injected into your spinal cord would produce tumors, and in one of the worst places to get them. Once we get there, there's still likely to be the barrier of organization, how to get these cells to make a functional cord instead of just disorganized neurons all over the place. This may have been affected somewhat by the ban, but again, mouse studies continued and we're still not there.
Bush hindered our understanding of stem cell biology with his ignorant hypocritical meddling, but putting the blame on him is misplaced. I'm sorry about your friend, but it wasn't Bush that destroyed his hopes, we biologists failed him on our own.
It should also be pointed out that the initial work that led to this discovery was done with mice stem cells (which had no such funding restrictions) which was only completed in 2008. This breakthrough is simply an extension of the technique to human stem cells. Do you really think that it would have been nearly a decade faster had the scientists been able to get US federal funding to do this with human cells instead of mouse cells? A delay of two years seems more plausible (if they had initially done this with human cells instead), and since it takes years to go from basic research to accepted treatments it is unlikely that your friend would have benefited from this.
Scientists found workarounds for the ban, like working on embryonic stem cells of animals or working on human adult stem cells or getting funding from other sources or analyzing pre-existing data or working in related fields that are now assisting research etc. This probably wasn't for the best, but it didn't stop the research.
I'm not saying that the ban was harmless. There will probably be excess deaths as a result. My point is that it is very difficult to measure the effects, and that they are probably far less serious than 8 whole years of lost research.