stem cell advances

Many of you have no doubt heard about that a Japanese team succeeded in stem cell therapy.

" It was the first time such transplants have worked on primates suffering from the degenerative nerve disorder, said Nobuo Hashimoto, a medical doctor at the Department of Neurosurgery at Kyoto University Graduate School of Medicine. 'Once we can confirm the safety of the therapy, we want the method to be applied to humans,' Hashimoto said. 'We hope clinical applications on humans will be available in about five years."

However another magazine with a somewhat antivivisectionist comment section had another take.

"the article in the January edition of the Journal of Clinical Investigation suggests there are limits in stem cell therapy as only "modest improvement" was seen in the monkey experiment and points out that many issues have yet to be resolved.

This article on regenerating heart damage got less press, but is actually more impressive. With heart disease the leading killer of men and women, any therapy that corrects heart damage after a heart attack or other insult could lessen morbidity and mortality.

"When injected into rats' hearts soon after a heart attack, stem cells taken from human umbilical cord blood (HUCB) greatly reduced the size of heart damage and restored pumping function to near normal. This improvement occurred without the need for drugs to prevent the rats' immune system from rejecting the human cells."

Hearts can be damaged by drugs, heart attacks, bacteria, hypertension, atherosclerosis and pulmonary diseases. Such a therapy could potentially be used to restore heart function and structure in all these cases. This sole achievement would dramatically increase lifespan in large % of the population.

Korea certainly appears to be leading the world in stem cell advances. The combination of a high tech infrastructure, an educated cadre of scientists and no restrictions on experimentation plus a cultural obsession with longevity and even immortality in myth and legend, taken together create an ideal milieu. Recent advances reported include,

"Park Se-pill, 44, the director of Maria Biotech Co., has demonstrated for the first time the possibility of treating incurable conditions, including neural tube defect, in embryos through stem cell therapy. Recently, a team at Inha University's medical school said it injected stem cells extracted from the bone marrow of patients with spinal paralysis into the damaged areas of the patients' spinal cords and found that their condition improved. Last month, Maria Biotech, a research institution established by Maria Infertility Hospital and Seoul National University Children's Hospital, said Mr. Park and Wang Kyu-chang, a professor of neurosurgery and dean of the university's medical school, succeeded in resealing open neural tubes of chicken embryos by injecting them with human embryonic stem cells. Another breakthrough in research on stem cell therapy came last year, when Mr. Park successfully transplanted genetically modified stem cells into the brain of a mouse with Parkinson's disease and cured it. Early this year, Hwang Woo-suk, a professor of veterinary medicine at Seoul National University, and a team of researchers there said they suceeded in growing stem cells from a cloned human embryo."

Here in the west, we are already far behind where we should have been due to research impediments from both Reagan's and the Bush's administrations. The Reagans came to see the error of their ways. Nancy knows full well that politics made her husband's decline far more precipitous than necessary. Everyone knows that as soon as there is one major cure from stem cells, all the political roadblocks will melt away. The radical fringes of evangelicism will still hold out, but they will be revealed as the margin they are (not the center as they claim). So lets get on it. Each passing year is one less year to make these advances in your lifetime. In order to benefit, you have to beat the curve of progress. Many millions will die just years or even months before therapies that have prolonged their lives for decades become widely available. We will look back in horror at those loved ones we could have saved if we had gotten this ball rolling sooner. There are already plenty of embryos in storage which will never be used in any way and eventually will die. A new korean law provides a possible model for us as well. "The government has passed a law that will allow stem cell and cloning research for therapeutic purposes, using only five-year-old frozen embryos that are ready to be discarded. It will take effect next year."