Headlines
As reported by the Danbury News-Times, April 16, 2006.
Stem-Cell Work in New Stage
State Allocates $100M for Expanded Research
By Robert Miller
There is a rare form of childhood leukemia that affects newborns or even infants in the womb. And Diane Krause wants to study it. Thanks to the state of Connecticut, she may soon be able to.
"The state funding is important," said Krause, assistant professor of laboratory medicine at the Yale School of Medicine in New Haven. "Without it, I would not be pursuing this."
Sometime this year, Krause said she hopes to be one of the beneficiaries of the state government's $100 million, 10-year commitment to stem-cell research. Through such research, she said she hopes to be able to study the roots of this form of leukemia at the embryonic level.
It's taken a year to set up the state program, which was backed by Gov. M. Jodi Rell and approved by the General Assembly in 2005. But Dr. J. Robert Galvin, the state commissioner of public health, and chairman of the Stem Cell Research Advisory Committee, said careful planning will soon take the state to the next stage.
"We anticipate being able to accept proposals by mid-May," Galvin said.
That means by early fall, the state may be able to start dispersing the first $20 million in funding to scientists.
Stem cells are those from which all organs and tissue develop. What makes them unique is that they can regenerate themselves in the laboratory over and over. And, scientists believe, they have the capacity to become any part of the body.
Researchers say stem-cell research will help them develop new drugs and learn the mechanisms of disease. Ultimately, they say they hope to use transplanted stem cells to treat everything from spinal cord injuries to damaged hearts to degenerative diseases, such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.
Given the possibilities, the distribution of state money has created a sense of anticipation in Connecticut's scientific community.
"It has enormous potential,'' said Marc Lalande, chairman of the Department of Genetics and Developmental Biology at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine in Farmington.
Because of the state funding, UConn has hired Dr. Ren He Xu, of the WiCell Research Institute, which is affiliated with the University of Wisconsin.
WiCell is the national stem-cell bank, the facility appointed by the National Institutes of Health to culture and grow 22 lines of stem cells. A stem-cell line is composed of a group of cells from a common source that can replicate themselves for long periods outside the body. The cell lines are grown in incubators.
UConn plans to do the same thing on a state level — create a stem-cell bank where different lines can be cultured, reproduced and distributed to researchers at other laboratories in Connecticut.
There will be one crucial difference. President Bush has said federal money can only be spent to research the 22 embryonic stem-cell lines that existed as of Aug. 9, 2001. Bush banned federal funding for creating and studying new embryonic stem-cell lines, because he and others say they believe human life begins at the moment of conception. And creating a stem-cell line involves the destruction of an embryo, which some believe is the taking of a human life.
Connecticut's funding has no such restrictions. The state can culture new lines of stem cells, and scientists can use them in their research.
Baldwin Wong, administrator of the National Institutes of Health's Stem Cell Task Force, said last week that it's valuable for researchers to have more stem-cell lines available. But the patchwork of state and federal laws can complicate things.
"You can study the news lines of stem cells," Wong said. "You just can't use federal money to do it. You have to keep the funding and the research separate. Some scientists are even building separate laboratories to make sure there is no confusion."
Connecticut is one of four states, along with California, New Jersey and Maryland, to establish its own stem-cell program. The state has done so in part to encourage research but also to develop the economy. If the field expands as expected, biotech firms and pharmaceutical companies will set up shop here to use the research findings for practical applications, said Lalande, of UConn's medical school.
But researchers are careful to remind people that what they are doing now is simply laying the groundwork for discoveries that may be decades away.
"We have to keep this in context," Lalande said. "The first stem-cell line was cultured in 1998. There is a great deal of work to do."
Wong, who spoke at Western Connecticut State University last week, said all tissues have adult stem cells. But they are relatively rare, harder to grow in the laboratory and seem only to grow into the organs they came from.
"Adult blood stem cells will only be blood cells," Wong said.
Embryonic stem cells don't have those limitations. They are harvested from the blastocyst — a largely hollow ball of cells that develops about five days after conception
Wong said scientists can culture these cells in a petri dish. Because they seem to have the unlimited capacity for growth if nourished, laboratories can eventually build up their stocks of different lines of stem cells.
"If you buy a vial of stem cells today, you get about 2 million cells," he said . "It costs about $5,000 a vial."
But harvesting the cells from a blastocyst means destroying it — it cannot develop into an infant. At WestConn, Wong discussed the ethical gray areas. For example, many couples who conceive through in-vitro fertilization still have frozen embryos stored in fertilization clinics.
"Right now the options are: You can give them to another couple, you can continue to store them, you can destroy them, or you can give them to research. I get calls about this all the time," he said.
Current research, Wong said, involves learning how to culture the cells. Researchers are also studying the long-term viability of the lines — how long they continue to propagate — and whether they can be transplanted into different bodies without rejection.
There is also much research using animal stem-cell lines, Wong said.
In the future, he said, researchers are going to study the use of stems cells in pharmaceuticals; in treating diseases, such as cancer, and in correcting genetic disease.
They might also be used to repair tissue damage, making heart muscles strong again or repairing spinal cords. Monkey models now show that stem cells can help brains create dopamine, he said, giving scientists hope of curing Parkinson's disease.
Researchers are pleased with the cooperation among different institutions — UConn, Yale, Wesleyan University — that are interested in getting state grants for stem-cell studies.
"We've been talking to Wesleyan, we've been talking to Yale," Lalande said. "We've had scientific meetings together every six months, and I expect that to continue. We've been very open with each other."
"It's been great," Krause said. "We've all gotten to know one another. There may be separate funding on out different applications, but we'll all continue to collaborate."
Wong, of the National Institutes of Health, said he's seen the same spirit on the international level. The International Society of Stem Cell Research started with only a handful of members.
"I've seen the membership grow to several thousand and there seems to be a lot of sharing," he said. "We all know it won't be just one scientist or one lab that will be making all the breakthroughs."
Today, he said there is significant stem-cell research in the United Kingdom, in Scandinavia, Israel, Australia and South Korea.
Wong also said there is a bill in the U.S. Congress that would remove some of Bush's restriction and allow researchers to use federal funds for new lines of stem cells. But he said Washington politicians are preoccupied with other issues.
"We have the war in Iraq," Wong said. "We have Hurricane Katrina."