While the media has been sidetracked with the Olympic games, the mental illness of the anthrax scientist, a hyped report about water on Mars, and drugs that turn mice into athletes, stem cells researchers have been quietly announcing truly spectacular work – the creation of 11 induced pluripotent stem (iPS) (aka “reprogrammed”) cell lines from sick people.
ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) iPS cells were announced last week, from Kevin Eggan’s group at Harvard, and today George Daley’s group at Children’s Hospital in Boston unveiled 10 more – and a birth announcement for the Harvard Stem Cell Institute Core lab, which will provide said cells and many more free to researchers (not to patients!).Also in this one-week span came word from Rudolf Jaenisch’s lab at the Whitehead Institute that they had found a safer alternative to one of the cancer-causing genes used to reprogram cells.
. “The new cell lines represent a collection of diseases that have no good treatments and, for the most part, no good animal models. This will allow researchers for the first time to watch the disease progress in a dish, opening the door to a new way to treat degenerative disease,” said Doug Melton, co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute at a press conference announcing the results on August 6.
Frustrations with using human ES cells helped pave the way for the new facility, added Daley. “Part of the goal of this iPS repository is to make sure these cells get to the largest number of research labs as possible. It is a resource for the entire biomedical community. We hope it will accelerate research and create a climate of openness.”
A major goal of stem cell research has been to create cell-based models of human disease. “And this is the paper that says, here they are, the first set,” Daley said. This “first wave” of diseases includes an immune deficiency, two forms of muscular dystrophy, Huntington disease, Gaucher disease, a rare blood disorder (Shwachman-Bodian-Diamond syndrome), Parkinson disease, type 1 diabetes, Down syndrome, and a Lesch-Nyhan syndrome carrier. “It’s a combination of what we were interested in and those with the most general interest. Over time, the number of iPS cell lines could equal or exceed the number of diseases,” Daley added.
And so it is a heady time for stem cell science — just on schedule for the anniversary of George W. Bush’s stranglehold on hES cell lines circa summer’s end, 2001.
Stay tuned …
Ricki Lewis is the author of the novel “Stem Cell Symphony” and many textbooks and articles. She is a geneticist and fellow of the Alden March Bioethics Institute.