Sort of a FrankenRat?
Posted on 01/13/2008 9:55:24 PM PST by neverdem
Medicine’s dream of growing new human hearts and other organs to repair or replace damaged ones received a significant boost Sunday when University of Minnesota researchers reported success in creating a beating rat heart in a laboratory.
Experts not involved in the Minnesota work called it “a landmark achievement” and “a stunning” advance. But they and the Minnesota researchers cautioned that the dream, if it is ever realized, was still at least 10 years away.
Dr. Doris A. Taylor, the head of the team that created the rat heart, said she followed a guiding principle of her laboratory: “give nature the tools, and get out of the way.”
“We just took nature’s own building blocks to build a new organ,” Dr. Taylor said of her team’s report in the journal Nature Medicine.
The researchers removed all the cells from a dead rat heart, leaving the valves and outer structure as scaffolding for new heart cells injected from newborn rats. Within two weeks, the cells formed a new beating heart that conducted electrical impulses and pumped a small amount of blood.
With modifications, scientists should be able to grow a human heart by taking stem cells from a patient’s bone marrow and placing them in a cadaver heart that has been prepared as a scaffold, Dr. Taylor said in a telephone interview from her laboratory in Minneapolis. The early success “opens the door to this notion that you can make any organ: kidney, liver, lung, pancreas — you name it and we hope we can make it,” she said.
Todd N. McAllister of Cytograft Tissue Engineering in Novato, Calif., said, “Doris Taylor’s work is one of those maddeningly simple ideas that you knock yourself on the head, saying, ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ ” Dr. McAllister’s team has used a...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The only way a ‘rat can have a heart is if someone builds one for ‘em. :D
stem cell ping
This an interesting concept, but it seems to hinge on the presence of a cadaver. About three years ago there was a research effort that grew a human ear on the back of a mouse. Using the donor cells, the ear was essentially a clone of the donor’s ear. It would have been genetically a match to the donor, not the mouse.
It would seem to me that something along these lines would be more in line with what needs to take place. And it could be done without a cadaver.
Perhaps I’m not understanding the situation clearly, because this could actually could be what is taking place in the new study. I sure would like to get away from the human cadaver model if possible, and this new study doesn’t seem to be consistant with a genetic match with the donor, but I can’t be certain.
All this, and I STILL don’t have a flying car.
Well, at least it’s clear Hillary already has a way to replace her heart. This had to have been a democrat scientist.
Yeah...We have faster computers than was ever dreamed, yet we have no flying car!
I dont give a rat’s ass....or heart.
Either make a human heart or you cant.
A person could get a temporary mechanical heart while they harvest and stimulate the growth of that person's own stem cells to proliferate prior to reinjection. Anti-rejection drugs, immunosuppressants, wouldn't be needed, IMHO.
Windows Vista, One Bad Year Later
FReepmail me if you want on or off my health and science ping list.
This will revolutionize Chinese cooking.
Sort of a FrankenRat?
They can use this technique to make a heart for Hillary, but it won’t give her a soul....
They were testing it on Hillary when she broke out in tears.
I know with the ear example on the mouse, you’re right about those immunodepresents. I’m not sure about the cadaver model, and that’s my concern. You could very well be right.
It is amazing what they can do these days for sure.
It does require the use of a cadaver, but the thing is, this is not the same thing as regrowing an ear, a nose, or even a finger. People that are awaiting heart transplants are not in a position to be choosy about possible unrecognized viruses (e.g., “HepF”). Speaking as a scientist, this is an amazing advance, and even more so because it is so incredibly simple. The researchers basically “dissolved” the heart using a detergent (you can actually find this detergent in a lot of shampoos - look for sodium dodecyl sulfate). That left a scaffold of the outer protein shell of the heart - things like the protein that makes up cartilage. The stem cells used this scaffold to grow a new heart.
The beauty of this study is that, yes, a cadaver is required, but it was neonatal mouse heart cells that were used to regrow the heart. Thus, the heart is genetically matched to the donor of the cells. In this case, a mouse fetus donated the cells, but we already know how to make cardiac stem cells from bone marrow stem cells. (However, and this is just my opinion here, I think that embryonic stem cells will be more useful in applications such as these. And this will require the pro-life version of ESCs, such as those that came out of Shinya Yamanaka’s lab, as ordinary stem cells will not be genetically matched to the donor, especially in the case of men requiring new hearts).
There has been some considerable discussion regarding the inability to put embrionic stem cells to good use. I may be way off base here, but it’s my understanding that there hasn’t been one truly beneficial ESC therapy implemented.
It seems that ESC efforts have resulted in mutated dead ends. Is that an eronious perception? I know there are about 50 to 60 adult stem cell therapies being utilized today, and I’m just wondering if ASCs still wouldn’t be the best bet here.
What’s your take on that? I would imagine from your recommendation, you must have some positive comments on ESVs, that you could provide, since you have expressed favoring their use.
I did pick up on the mention of approved ESCs BTW.
The thing is, the first isolation of human ESCs was accomplished in 1998. Other human stem cells (e.g., bone marrow stem cells) have been available for 30+ years. It’s not surprising that ESCs have failed to yield any useful therapies, given their relatively recent discovery.
ESCs are essentially the wave of the future - irregardless of the political dimensions, they have a greater potential for therapy than adult stem cells do. That is really simply scientific fact. But in terms of their use as therapy, they won’t be derived from actual embryos - because the embryos aren’t genetically matched to the recipient. Instead, ESCs actually used in therapies will likely be skin cells that have been modified to behave as ESCs (iPCs). Essentially, by turning on four (or three) genes in your skin cells, they will become ESCs.
I am fully pro-life. Harming embryos is tantamount to murder for me - thus, I endorse Bush’s stand on denying federal funding to the creation of new ESC lines. However, the list given by many organizations of adult stem cell therapies in use is woefully overexaggerated. I think that the number typically given is 74, whereas in reality, the number is between 10-20. Innocent life should not be destroyed in the pursuit of new therapies. However, I think that we should be honest about scientific realities.
Adult stem cells do not have the therapeutic potential of ESCs. There are attendant problems with ESCs, such as teratomas, etc - but the potential, to be honest, dwarfs the risks. The question essentially comes down to whether the destruction of innocent life is worth the benefits. I don’t think so. And these new iPCs offer the benefits without the moral problems. I think that this is where we should be putting our money.
I appreciate your comments and I understand what you’re trying to say. What puzzels me, and I’m not being argumentitive, is why we use adult stem cells now for let’s say 10 to 20 therapies. You mention that this is so because we only discovered ESCs in 1999. Why haven’t we converted those therapies to ESVs if they are so much better?
It seems you make the same mistake that my wife and I do. 1999 sounds like last year, but in truth it’s nine years ago. Discovering ESVs that long ago (and in this age of rapid advancement nine years is like an eternity), I’m really surprised we’d still be utilizing other than ESVs if they are so much better.
Again, I’m not trying to be a smart ass. I’m just making an observation.
No, they’re good questions. Actually, the only technique that is commonly used today with adult stem cells is bone marrow transplants (but this can be used to treat a number of disorders, like leukemia, lymphoma, X-linked SCID, etc.). There have been some limited clinical trials for other adult stem cells; for example, trying to replace pancreatic islet cells as a treatment for diabetes. However, when you consider that the first bone marrow transplant was done in 1956, it seems as if these cell-based therapies move at glacially slow paces.
The reason ESCs haven’t been swapped out for adult stem cells is that the adult stem cells are very good at what they do - regrow the cells in the blood system. And there are potential problems with ESCs, such as cancers called teratomas, that using adult stem cells avoids. But by far the biggest reason that ESCs aren’t used today is that there are very few ESC lines. Thus, they’re almost certainly not going to be a genetic match to the recipient, and the recipient’s immune system will attack them. The adult stem cells, however, only regrow the blood system (and maybe heart tissue). They’ll never grow into a liver or a kidney, whereas ESCs potentially can.
Both sides of this stem cell debate tend to exaggerate enormously. However ESCs reach the clinic (and I’m praying that it’s the prolife iPCs that do so first - they hold more promise anyway), they’re not going to get there for another 20 years. The pro-stem cell people don’t acknowledge that fact readily.
However, ESCs do have a lot of therapeutic potential. And the reason that I think pro-life people should be honest about this is that people will feel like they can discount our opinion if we’re not honest up front. What it comes down to is that one innocent human life cannot be traded for another. And more power to the people that invent morally safe treatments such as iPCs.
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