The Niche

Stem-cell companies anticipate friendlier federal environment

News reports today say stem-cell companies are getting a boost from expectations that federal support for embryonic stem cell research will soon be less restricted, even if the companies don’t work in embryonic stem cells. Crain’s Detroit Business quotes officials of Oncomed, Aastrom, and more. The Bay Area newspaper also has a thoughtful piece.

StemCells Inc. has just announced a $20 million equity financing from an un-named institutional investor, through a shelf registration. The company has a Battens disease trial using neural stem cells derived from fetuses.

One of the menstrual stem-cell companies just announced a deal with the NIH. According to the press release, iron nanoparticles will be used to follow the human cells as they circulate around a mouse engineered to have breast cancer. (Actually, the press release only says “breast cancer model”; I’’m guessing it’s a mouse, though it could be a dog or a worm.) The ability to track cells is important, and so is figuring out how mesenchymal stem cells track to different organs. In fact, they may even help breast cancer metastasize. (See The dark side of mesenchymal stem cells.) Mesenchymal stem cells seem to come from many sources, and menstrual blood seems like one of them. (CryoCell is one of several companies that charges customers to bank cells for applications that have not yet been developed and may never be. See Stem cell banking: life line or sub-prime? For more on mesenchymal stem cells in general, see Questioning the self cell. For more on menstrual stem cells see Mesenchymal stem cells in the womb ).


BTW: I am highly annoyed by some of the reporting about Obama’s likely move to allow federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research with lines created after August 2001.

On one hand, I’ve read at least one scientist gushing that with the federal funding ban lifted, cures to spinal cord injury, diabetes, and more are just around the corner. That’s irresponsible. Cell therapies are hard; science is slow. Ten years have passed since human ES cells were first isolated. Even if research hadn”t been slowed by the Bush policies, it’s still going to take a while. Remember, the first monoclonal antibodies were produced in the late 1970s.

On the other hand are blogs purposely conflating the derivation of ES cells with abortion, even referring to blastocysts as ‘prenatals.’ A judge just threw out a lawsuit in Missouri to prevent embryonic stem cell research. The group filing the lawsuit said it wanted to prevent researchers from making profits off abortions. Abortion removes a developing fetus from a woman”s womb (occasionally in gruesome ways). ES cells are made from blastocysts that were created in lab and that have never been inside a woman’s body. The 5-7 day old blastocysts that are destroyed to make ES cells are microscopic hollow balls containing a few dozen cells. In fact, fetuses are far too old to contain ES cells; so are gastrulas, the dented-in hollow balls in which undifferentiated cells are forming the fundamental germ layers (i.e. nerves and skin (ectoderm), muscles and more (mesoderm), gut lining (endoderm)). I realize that many people who oppose ES cell research do not see a moral difference between a fertilized egg and a fetus or between an embryo in a culture dish (where it will, eventually, die) and an embryo in a pregnant woman (where it can, eventually, grow into a baby). However, I think these descriptions are purposefully misleading.

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