[Mb-civic] Harvard scientists advance cell work - The Boston Globe

[William Swiggard]

Harvard scientists advance cell work
Technique doesn't destroy embryos

By Gareth Cook and Carey Goldberg, Globe Staff  |  August 22, 2005

Harvard scientists have created cells similar to human embryonic stem 
cells without destroying embryos, a major step toward someday possibly 
defusing the central objection to stem cell research.

The team showed that when a human skin cell was fused with an embryonic 
stem cell, the resulting hybrid looked and acted like the stem cell. The 
implications: It may eventually be possible to fashion tailor-made, 
genetically matched stem cells for patients using such a cell fusion 
technique, rather than by creating and then destroying a cloned embryo. 
That use of early embryos is the main sticking point for opponents of 
stem cell research.

The Harvard researchers cautioned that the fusion technique, described 
in this week's issue of the journal Science, is inefficient and deeply 
flawed at this point, and emphasized that it should not deter embryonic 
stem-cell research that involves embryos, nor diminish support for such 
research.

''Our technology is not ready for prime-time yet," said Kevin Eggan, the 
paper's senior author and an assistant professor at Harvard. ''Our 
results do not offer an alternative now."

The paper comes amid debate in Congress over whether the federal 
government should expand its financing for research on embryonic stem 
cells, which are seen as potential treatments for a range of diseases 
such as Type 1 diabetes and Parkinson's. Eggan said he feared that his 
work could be cited by opponents who have argued for finding ways of 
doing stem cell research without using human embryos.

''The timing is complicated and I worry about it," Eggan said.

The work is part of a broader effort to find ways to conduct embryonic 
stem-cell research without destroying embryos, a quest spurred by 
politics but driven mostly by the needs of scientific inquiry.

There is a limited supply of human eggs, which are needed for creating 
embryos through cloning, and egg donors face a slight health risk. The 
new cell fusion technique would enable scientists to create vastly 
greater quantities of embryonic stem cells for research.

That would mean they could do far more experiments aimed at 
understanding what happens when a regular, adult cell is transformed 
into an embryonic stem cell, a process known as ''reprogramming." 
Researchers are struggling to determine how a cell that is ''adult," 
already committed to its role in the body as, for example, a nerve cell 
or skin cell, regresses back to the proto-state in which, as a stem 
cell, it could still potentially become any of the hundreds of types of 
cells in the body.

http://www.boston.com/news/science/articles/2005/08/22/harvard_scientists_advance_cell_work/
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