Stem cell therapy is not a conventional treatment using an external agent and so the normal 15 year development pipeline for new pharmaceutical products does not apply. Indeed the gap between seeing promising stem cell results in animals and starting first human trials can be as short as 15 days.
Suppose you have a heart attack. A cardiothoracic surgeon talks to you about using your own stem cells in an experimental treatment. You agree. A sample of bone marrow is taken from your hips, and processed using standard equipment found in most oncology centers for treating leukemia. The result is a concentrated number of special bone marrow cells, which are then injected back into your own body - either into a vein in your arm, or perhaps direct into the heart itself.
The surgeon is returning your own unaltered stem cells back to you, to whom these cells legally belong. This is not a new molecule requiring years of animal and clinical tests. Your own adult stem cells are available right now. No factory is involved - nor any pharmaceutical company sales team.
What is more, there are no ethical questions (unlike embryonic stem cells), no risk of tissue rejection, no risk of cancer.
Now we begin to see why research funds are moving so fast from embryonic stem cells to adult alternatives.
Harvard Medical School is another center of astonishing progress in adult stem cells. Trials have shown partially restored sight in animals with retinal damage. Clinical trials are expected within five years, using adult stem cells as a treatment to cure blindness caused by macular degeneration - old-age blindness and the commonest cause of sight-loss in America. Within 10 years it is hoped that people will be able to be treated routinely with their own stem cells in a clinic using a two-hour process.
If you want further evidence of this switch in interest from embryonic to adult stem cells,, look at the makers of Dolly the sheep. The Rosslyn Institute in Scotland are pioneers in cloning technology. They along with others campaigned successfully in UK Parliament for the legal right to use the same technology in human embryos (therapeutic cloning, not with the aim of clones being born). But three years later, they had not even bothered to apply for a human cloning licence.
Why not? Because investors were worried about throwing money at speculative embryo research with massive ethical and reputational risks. Newcastle University made headlines in August 2004 when granted the first licence to clone human embryos - but the real story was why it had taken so long to get a single research institute in the UK to actually get on and apply. Answer: medical research moved on and left the "therapeutic" human cloners behind.
No comments:
Post a Comment