Researchers get the go-ahead to create disease-specific human embryonic stem cell lines.
Adrianne Appel
Researchers at Harvard University announced today that they are embarking on a project to create human embryonic stem cell lines from cells donated by people with certain diseases, in an effort to learn more about those diseases and eventually find new treatments.
The stem cell lines are being created using somatic cell nuclear transfer, in which the nucleus containing the DNA is removed from an egg and replaced with the nucleus of a donor cell. Stem cells removed from the resulting five-day old embryo are genetically identical to the donor cells.
Douglas Melton, co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, and Harvard University assistant professor Kevin Eggan, will lead the project.
“We approved the project after the most extensive scientific and ethical review in recent history,” said Steven Hyman, Harvard’s provost.
While the Harvard researchers have already created stem cell lines from embryos leftover from in vitro fertilization treatments, they have now received approval from various institutional review boards and oversight committees to clone embryos using eggs donated by female volunteers and skin cells donated by patients with diabetes, and, pending further approvals, neurodegenerative diseases.
Studying stem cells from these embryos promises to lead to new insights into how these diseases come about and how one might treat them.
The team will work with Boston IVF, a commercial fertility clinic, to obtain the eggs.
Female volunteer donors will not be paid although they will be provided a special health insurance policy in case they suffer complications from the procedure, which requires extra doses of hormones.
Human stem cell research and cloning are highly controversial as it requires the destruction of five-day old embryos. In 2001, the Bush administration banned the use of federal funds on human embryonic stem cell research, except for work with a small number of pre-existing cell lines. The Harvard project will be entirely privately funded.
It’s taken the researchers two years to raise enough private money, work through the ethical aspects of this research, and to obtain all the necessary review board approvals, they said.
Adrianne Appel is a freelance writer in Cambridge, Massachusetts.