Stem-Cell Research Funding Institute Is Shuttered

An anonymous reader writes "The National Institutes of Health, the top funder of biomedical research in the U.S., has closed a program designed to bring induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) from the lab to the clinic. It has made no public mention of the closure, but the website has been deleted and Nature News reports that the center director, Mahendra Rao, resigned his post in frustration after the program allocated funds to only one clinical trial in its last round of funding."

Comments

Fuck the politics. This sucks regardless

[sconeu]

This sucks regardless of what side of the aisle you are on.

There are diseases where the only known effective treatment at this point in time is stem cells. And those are/were in the trial stages.

Fuck politics.

Re:So Obama canceled stem cell research?

[RDW]

"James Anderson, director of the NIHâ(TM)s Division of Program Coordination, Planning, and Strategic Initiatives, which administered the CRM, counters that only one application - that made by Kapil Bharti of the National Eye Institute in Bethesda and his colleagues - received a high enough score from an external review board to justify continued funding."

You can take this at face value, or assume academic politics, but it doesn't seem like party politics.

Sequester strikes again

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not because of the subject that the research is being stopped. The NIH, along with the NSF and NASA, had its science budget cut during the sequester and it hasn't recovered. Lots of programs all over the country are being discontinued as a result.

Re:Well

[kaliann]

They shouldn't be.

Induced stem cells are the huge area of research devoted to finding ways around using embryonic stem cells. Basically, it's everything but embryonic stem cells in stem cell research.

We will, eventually, have reliable, cheap mechanisms for inducing stem cell potential in non-embryonic-derived cells, but only by continuing research on how to make them.

This is a travesty.

Waybackmachine on Dr. Mahendra Rao

[DTentilhao]

Mahendra Rao, M.D., Ph.D.

"Dr. Mahendra Rao is internationally renowned for his research involving human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) and other somatic stem cells. He has worked in the stem cell field for more than 20 years, with stints in academia, government and regulatory affairs and industry. He received his M.D. from Bombay University in India and his Ph.D. in developmental neurobiology from the California Institute of Technology.

Following postdoctoral training at Case Western Reserve University, he established his research laboratory in neural development at the University of Utah. He next joined the National Institute on Aging as chief of the Neurosciences Section, where he studied neural progenitor cells and continued to explore his longstanding interest in their clinical potential.

Most recently, he spent six years as the vice president of Regenerative Medicine at Life Technologies in Carlsbad, California. He co-founded Q Therapeutics, a neural stem cell company based in Salt Lake City, Utah. He also served internationally on advisory boards for companies involved in stem cell processing and therapy; on committees, including as the U.S. Food and Drug Administrationâ(TM)s Cellular Tissue and Gene Therapies Advisory Committee chair; and as the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine and International Society for Stem Cell Research liaison to the International Society for Cellular Therapy." ref

Correcting Lies

[SuperKendall]

I'm an indépendant but I do hater liars of any stripe - the Republicans only objected to embryonic stem cells, there are lots of other paths and kinds of stem cells.

The Republicans otherwise funded stem cell research.

Re:Correcting Lies

[Oligonicella]

Facts are not talking points. Blanket accusations like in the GP are.

Re:Correcting Lies

[Luckyo]

This is actually correct, as the article talks about induced stem cells. Induced means they are not stem cells naturally (i.e. embyonic).

Without getting into the whole "who believes in god, life and are adults with invisible friends silly" argument, the point is that this field of research is about making stem cells out of cells that are not stem cells. In other words, from cells that we don't have to extract from embryos.

This is why the research is so difficult in largely fruitless.

Re:Correcting Lies

[T.E.D.]

Odd definition of "Lie"

What happened was that there was ongoing funding of stem-cell research, much of it government-funded. However, there's an existing law that forbids any government funding of abortion. When fetal stem-cell research became a possibility, President Clinton issued an executive order saying that research didn't count against the law. Then he left office, and President Bush (II) issued his own order saying it did qualify (at least for any new fetal tissues). When president Obama took office, he issued his own order saying it was OK again.

Yes, all that was banned was new fetal tissue research. But that was where the new research was being done at the time, so its a distinction without much difference.

Today Congress is (perhaps inadvertently) getting around this re-funding by simply blanket defunding all government funding of research (along with everything else). This was the only kind of "budget" they could agree to. This has nothing whatsoever to do with Obama though. Sure, he signed the law for the current qasi-budget we operate under, but only because it was the best we were ever likely to get out of a House of Reps (yes, run by Republicans) that reflexively votes against anything he so much as says a kind word about.

Perhaps the Republican goal wasn't to defund stem-cell research, but that's certainly the effect. At some point incompetence becomes advanced enough that it is indistinguishable from malice.

Re:Correcting Lies

[T.E.D.]

The truth is that the House has repeatedly passed budgets, and the Demoncrat controlled Senate led by Dingy Harry Reid has refused to take them up.

That's one of those "truths" that folks like to hide lies in. Yes, the House has repeatedly passed budgets, that is true. It is also true that the Senate has repeatedly passed budgets, and Obama has repeatedly submitted budgets he'd be happy to sign to Congress. So everyone's doing their job in good faith, right?

Clearly not. The real truth here is that the House's "budgets" have contained no attempt whatsoever to contain language that has a hope of passing in the Senate, much less get a signature from the POTUS. The House knew full well those budgets wouldn't pass when they voted for them. So pretending these were serious attempts at legislation is a flat out lie.

The Senate's passed budgets, on the other hand, quite often could get a majority in the house (and a POTUS signature). The House deals with this situation that threatens to produce an actual budget by refusing to bring them up for a vote.

So yeah, we could mislead everyone and claim the House has been trying to pass budgets, or we could tell the honest truth.

Re:Fuck the politics. This sucks regardless

[interkin3tic]

This is bureaucratic troubles, not partisan politics. No one is opposed to iPS on ideological grounds. Well, no one who is worth considering anyway. iPS aren't made from embryos. ESC are the ones that conservatives hate, that come from fertilized eggs.

Re:So Obama canceled stem cell research?

[Luckyo]

That sounds like the actual reason and the main problem behind iPS. They are about as high of a hanging fruit as there is on that particular tree of science right now. A lot of research into inducing cell into becoming a stem cell has been done, and the only methods that work are extremely difficult and expensive to implement.

As a result, there's a lot less research on the topic, simply because we have already picked all but the highest hanging fruit already. Most methods are either impractical or are being outed as either mistakes or fraud (read up on STAP cells for a good recent example, they were outed as fraud just a week ago by the same research institute that hailed their invention in january). So if internal review board can't find good research, it's likely not because of politics, but because there simply is very little promising research available on the subject.

Re:So Obama canceled stem cell research?

[T.E.D.]

Obama doesn't fund the government. That's Congress' job.

People like to say "Bush banned stem-cell research". Because he took an executive order to do so, at a time when Congress was backing everything he did (he did not veto a single bill during his first 6 years in office, which I believe is a record).

Obama has pretty much the opposite kind of Congress. The only blame you could possibly give Obama for this is for not pretending that he hated stem-cell funding research, thus forcing them all to pass bills requiring it. Reverse psychology is about the only thing that could possibly work for him at this point.

Re:Well

[geekoid]

Only one got past an external review board. Who was on that board? qualified experts in the field, or elected officials?
I"m being a little paranoid, but I ahve spent a lot of the last 15 years or so trying to get some people in congress to understand science and watch them just cut programs. People saying things like 'Science should only be funded if it makes money'. Elected officials with that level of ignorance is really shameful

Re:Fuck the politics. This sucks regardless

[sconeu]

Let me explain the title of the post.

I was the third poster. The first two were fuck Obama posts.

I don't give a shit if it's W or Obama or Ted Cruz or Pelosi or whoever. It sucks. period.

Re:So Obama canceled stem cell research?

[NotDrWho]

Pssh...stem cell research is sooooo 90's. It's all about solar energy and electric cars now.

Re:Embryonic stem cell research

[Doubting Sapien]

Please mod parent up, as it ought to be considered an honest question deserving of an honest answer.

I work with human embryonic stem cells (hESC). I'm going to hazard a guess that you've bought into certain propaganda efforts attempting to mislead the public into believing ESC research "destroys" embryos. That is not at all the case. First a primer in cell biology: At a certain stage in their life cycle, most normal "somatic" cells enter a stage called "senescence" where they may continue to live but no longer divide and will eventually die. Stem cells, on the other hand, have the unique ability to continue dividing indefinitely without becoming "old". This "self-renewal" property makes a stem cell culture very much like the "mother dough" a baker would use to perpetuate starter cultures for years or decades.

Our lab uses uses cells that originated from fertility treatment at my institution's OB/GYN clinic. Individuals who have achieved a successful pregnancy would consent to allow fertilized but unimplanted embryos to be used for research purposes. (If we didn't ask for them, they would have been destroyed as medical waste.) During the early stages of growth, all the cells in the embryo have stem cell qualities and are all "self-renewing". Under artificial growth conditions, these cells are coaxed into remaining stem cells without developing further into a fetus with all different types of tissues and organs. As such, they remain masses of stem cells that could be split/divided and given to research groups as necessary.

So you see, a single embryo can establish a "cell line" that (depending on culture methods and/or skill/technique of cell-culturist) can be maintained indefinitely by researchers. At the moment, the "economics" of this has more to do with the resources needed to grow them rather than obtain them. Cell culture growth media is incredibly expensive right now because it is hard to keep these delicate, finicky guys happy in lab conditions. (Stem cells like growing in an organic environment - not in a dish.) So far, embryonic stem cells are only being used for research as a way to study some fundamental things that are still poorly understood. (Like for example how to grow cells intended for tissue/organ transplant in artificial conditions cheaply and reliably. Expect cost to come down as we make progress on this front.) My lab, for example, only grows enough of them to support a few experiments at a time on DNA damage/repair. Now, the anticipated therapeutic use of stem cells are different. But you would not necessarily need millions of them as one would as in the case of drug manufacturing to produce useful proteins. Because stem cells are "self-renewing", conceivably you only need enough of them to keep itself going in, say, replacing a failed organ or tissue.

At the moment, it is too early to concretely say what the future might look like where stem cells are commercially used for therapies. A couple of possible guesses for how they can be obtained: 1) a person donates his/her own by having parents who made the smart decision to bank "cord blood" saved from the umbilical cord when the baby was born. 2) the small minute number of stem cells that circulate in the blood or exist elsewhere in the body can be extracted. 3) Cells from other parts of your body that have already specialized into certain cell types can be treated to return them to a "stem-cell-like-state". This last thing is what people are talking about when they mention "induced pluri-potent stem cells" (iPSC). In any case, I find it hard to come up with a scenario where stem cells take on the qualities of a commodity to be produced for mass consumption. I suppose anything is possible, but other problems need to be solved along the way, like how to prevent organ rejection when your immune system recognize that your implant doesn't belong to you.

Re:Fuck the politics. This sucks regardless

[Doubting Sapien]

However the issue with embryonic stem cells are that they come from aborted human fetuses.

This is right-wing propaganda at its worst. embryonic stem cells DO NOT COME FROM ABORTED HUMAN FETUSES. They come from left over embryos that those seeking fertility treatment no longer need. They were never aborted because they were never implanted in the first place. Because they were never implanted, they never had the chance to develop into anything near resemblance to a fetus. Please get your facts straight, no matter which side of the debate you are on.