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Science

Ultimate Stem Cell Discovered 320

Posted by Hemos from the more-research-needed dept.
bofh31337 writes "Newscientist is reporting that the University of Minnesota has discovered a new stem cell in adults. It is thought this stem cell will be able to turn into any single tissue in the body." The article is kinda breathy, especially for New Scientist - but if this is true, which needs to be studied more, this will dramatically alter the landscape for stem cell research.
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Ultimate Stem Cell Discovered More

Ultimate Stem Cell Discovered

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  • ageless cells? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Sebastopol ( 189276 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2002 @06:27PM (#2890738) Homepage
    The cells seem to grow indefinitely in culture, like ESCs. Some cell lines have been growing for almost two years and have kept their characteristics, with no signs of ageing, she says.

    Two years? Damn, now that's an example careful experimentation. Although, I'd like to know what "aging" implies, and if she'd have to wait 80 or so years to see real human aging. Any biologists out there care to explain what aging looks like on the cellular level?

    • Re:ageless cells? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      It looks like simple mitosis, but the telomeres get shorter. When you run out of telomeres, the cell has reached the end of its life.

      • Re:ageless cells? (Score:4, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23, 2002 @06:38PM (#2890808)
        incidentally, this is what cancer does. it prevents the shortening of the telomeres, so cells that have turned cancerous don't "die".

      • It's not even always that simple. Cancer cells evolve means of sidestepping the telomeric shortening in at least several poorly understood ways.


        SOME cancerous cells have a perpetually turned on telomerase at some level to maintain the chromosome ends. Others seem to make do without apparent telomerase activity...recombination or other means. As a side note, fruit flies (Drosophila) do not have telomeres in the classic sense. They rely entirely on recombination events to produce repetitive chromosome ends that do the same thing as telomeres.


        Finally, telomeres are only a part of the puzzle of ageing. They are not the end-all be-all of immortality. Ageing is a complex interplay of biochemical and genetic events. Programmed senescence (telomeres play a part in this) as well as simple wear and tear.


        If you gave yourself a telomerase-stimulating drug in the hopes that you would slow down ageing, what you would actually end up doing is enhancing your risk of developing cancer.


        In any case, telomeres shorten with each cell division (except in germ cells) until a critical point is reached. Then proteins that interact with the telomeric DNA begin shutting down genes adjacent to the telomeres and activate others which subsequently alter the expression of other genes. Mitochondria deteriorate with age regardless of telomeric shortening and gradually produce more and more damaging oxygen radicals which do runaway damage to the mitochondrial DNA, mitochondrial proteins, and its cell wall which exacerbates the production of radicals at the expense of energy production. Other parts of the cell take damage from leaking mitochondria, from your nuclear DNA to cellular proteins and cell wall lipids. Random damage to DNA also takes its toll outside of the oxygen radicals. Repair proteins become themselves damaged and are expressed at lower levels so your damage repair systems degenerate too. You can't even hope to increase their production because if you produce too much of a "good thing" the cells sense this as a problem and apoptos/die.


        There is a lot more to ageing than telomere shortening, to cut it short.

    • Re:ageless cells? (Score:5, Informative)

      by boaworm ( 180781 ) <boaworm@gmail.com> on Wednesday January 23, 2002 @06:37PM (#2890802) Homepage Journal
      Most cell knows when it is going to die. Our skincells for example are programmed to die after about 7 weeks, in this way, the skin does refresh itself and you have a nice healthy skin.
      So.. if you clone a cell that is already say 3 weeks old, all clones from that cell will start of at the age of 3 weeks, having only 4 weeks left to live until "terminated".
      This is what happened to Dolly, the cloned Sheep. Dolly's cells started of with the same biological clock as her "mother" (herself ? ;), so she is "ageing" very fast to catch up with herself.

      • Re:ageless cells? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by 6EQUJ5 ( 446008 )

        Don't forget, an immortal cell is... cancer. That double-edged sword again... :(

        • Careful here! (Score:3, Insightful)

          by HiThere ( 15173 )
          Some ageless cells are cancer.

          Some are the sources of sperm and ova.

          Some are probably the source of the blood, villi, skin, etc. (Yes, there are cells that aren't totipotent that are the sources here, but they don't have any obvious aging built in.)

          If there are a few totipotent stem cells in an adult, it wouldn't be any big surprise. There probably won't be many of them, as they would be (are?) quite dangerous (one little mutation and ...), but they aren't automatically cancerous.
          .

    • Re:ageless cells? (Score:5, Informative)

      by myc ( 105406 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2002 @06:43PM (#2890852)
      aging in cells, at a molecular level, usuallly means a shortening of telomeres from one generation to the next. This typically has other consequences as well, such as cell cycle arrest.

      telomeres are special structures at the end of eukaryotic chromosomes that protect the ends and facilitate DNA replication of linear DNA. cells that have circular genomes (such as bacteria) do not have DNA ends and therefore do not have nor need telomeres. old cells have short telomeres and therefore have a harder time replicating their DNA. This is an overly simplified explanation, of course.

    • Keeping in mind that my answer is drawing from a micriobiology class I took in the dim dark ages (the late '80s), two years is a helluva long time because we're not talking about the age of the organism, we're talking about the number of generations of cells from the original that seem to be multiplying without observed mutation, etc.

      In fact, we studied a particularly remarkable cancerous cell line that was significant in that even though the patient died something like twenty five years ago (?), the particular cell line has remained viable (it still divides into new cells true to the original) since then.

      I haven't decided how related this is, but penicillin only became a useful antibiotic only after a couple of other inventors were able to find a growth medium (corn steep liquor) that allowed large quantities of the organism to breed true.

      So if the New Scientist article is correct and there is not a generational OR a quantity limiting factor in these cells, my thought is that this is a Noble-Prize level discovery.

    • Re:ageless cells? (Score:3, Informative)

      by sean23007 ( 143364 )
      Every other type of stem cell except for the Embryonic Stem Cell (ESC) exhibits rapid aging. By rapid, they mean hours to days before the entire cell line is dead (in culture). These cells have very short life spans and take a very short time to reproduce. By aging, they mean "unbidden mutation." ESCs don't do this, and apparently neither do these. This is an amazing advancement.

      But you're right, the important thing is whether or not these cells can be put into a human (and work). Then we would find out what kind of aging (in the well-known human sense of the word) these cells experience.
    • http://www.nature.com/nsu/990114/990114-6.html
    • Any biologists out there care to explain what aging looks like on the cellular level?

      Their cillia starts to fall out in the front, or in a circular patch over their oral pore. They get a lot more moody, and thinner, and they tend to say lots of things like "Eh, my endoplasmic reticulum isn't what it used to be!", and "In my day, they didn't teach Mitosis in school, you just learned about it the hard way!" If the cells can afford it, they try to move south for their last days, which explains the appearance of some higher mammals...

    • There has been a direct correlation found between cell age and the length of certain sections of the genetic code called "telomeres". As a cell ages, these telomeres grow shorter. Scientists believe that this may be one of the ways cells "know when to die".

    • For cell cultures, ageing generally refers to senescence. Most normal cells, once cultured, can manage about 50 doublings before they senesce and will grow no more. Large, scattered areas of the genome are silenced, the mitochondria deteriorate and produce more damaging oxygen radicals per unit ATP (energy) produced, which leads to oxidative damage to proteins, cell walls, and genetic material. On top of that, the repair machinery becomes less and less capable.


      Basically, the cell shuts down and then wears out. That is ageing on the cellular level.

      The standard way around this is to immortalize cells. This can mean anything from simply growing lots of normal cells out and selecting those cells that manage to keep going - they've acquired mutations that permit continued cell divisions. A faster and easier way is to either transfect the cells with an immortalizing defective virus (cancer causing outside of cell culture) or mutagenizing the cells chemically or radioactively to obtain a similar result - mutant cells, with cancer-like tendencies, that can grow indefinitely. You can also start cultures from human tumors...they are already at least partially immortalized.


      With a lot of the stem cells, you can get them to grow and grow indefinitely if they are handled properly - don't let them grow too dense, continual tissue culture media changing to help prevent the build up of signal protein and signal molecule gradients that would drive the cells to start differentiating. Once they differentiate, barring mutations as mentioned above, their lifespan is limited.

      • Once they differentiate, barring mutations as mentioned above, their lifespan is limited

        There was a show on Discovery Health about regrowing limbs a few days ago. The example they gave was a Salamander; if it loses a limb the cells on the wound revert to an earlier form, look around and start duplicating and rebuilding the limb. Is this basically what you would do with a human? Smear stem cells on the stub and they'll regrow as the lost body part?

    • When they say there's no sign of aging, they more than likely mean that the progeny of one cell doesn't have shorter DNA fragments than the parent cell.

      As you go through life, you're bombarded by radiation (like UV) which actually destroys DNA in different places. In effect, what you get is shortened lengths of DNA, due to their being cut.

      This is exactly what they were worried about with Dolly. If Dolly was cloned from a cell which already had shortened DNA, would all her cells start that way, and the progeny get shorter quicker? In other words, would she be born with the effective age of her mother clone?

      I believe this is the main mechanism behind the Hayflick Number, which is a measure of how many times a cell can reliably divide before it will stop dividing. I think it's 21. So they were worried that Dolly would have less divisions left, and would die young.

      It's been a while since I was in the lab, so someone please feel free to correct me if I've steered too far of course here.

  • Standard Fundie Alert! (Score:4, Troll)

    by Tackhead ( 54550 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2002 @06:28PM (#2890739)
    > A stem cell has been found in adults that can turn into every single tissue in the body.

    Oh no! Extracting and growing these cells to cure diseases would be like killing millions and millions of clones of yourself! It's like having a million abortions, or even worse, committing suicide a million times over! We must ban research immediately! If God had wanted us to be healed, He wouldn't have let us get sick in the first place!

    • Oh no! Microsoft has released a new product! It's a conspiracy, they want to dominate the world, it has security holes and crashes a lot. Microsoft sucks, Linux rules! Linux is great, and everyone should use it! Free software forever!
      There are many types of fundamentalism my friend.
      This article is more proof that the liberals decrying the goverment's reasonable restrictions on ESC's are morons. If this research proves true (and that's an IF) ECS would be unnecessary.
    • Moron. The difference is that these can be harvested without killing the adult. Embryonic stem cells could only be harvested by slaying the embryo.
      • Yeah, here's your embryo [ama-assn.org]. MURDER! MURDER! I can see a face in that right cell!

  • Stem cells from Liposuction can be used too (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Therin ( 22398 ) <slashtherinNO@SPAMbjmoose.com> on Wednesday January 23, 2002 @06:29PM (#2890747) Homepage
    One other very promising source of stem cells is from liposuction - check out StemSource [stemsource.com] for details

  • Yet to be Confirmed (Score:2, Insightful)

    by The Raven ( 30575 )
    The tests seem to hold promise, but it is not confirmed yet. But if it works... ooh, the excitement. 'Free' stem cells, with no issues about embryos and cloning is a dream come true to scientists working in this field.

    I wonder how long before practical applications of this research become available... five years? Ten?

    Raven
    • I wonder how long before practical applications of this research become available... five years? Ten?

      If the economy keeps tanking and health care costs keep going up, I'm guessing that the practical applications will be unavailable to anyone with less than a 7 figure income.
    • Yes, this can be very good. I sincerely hope that it works and people can go back to debating abortion instead.

      Just think of the potential of this. You think a lot of people died on sep. 11? More could be saved by this.

      Now to help make the abortion debate moot, we could use some good reliable birth control. I don't think abybody likes abortion. I mean, not as a recreational thing.

  • the best news is.... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Restil ( 31903 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2002 @06:33PM (#2890771) Homepage
    If you donate stem cells from willing adults, you don't have all the ethical arguments you get with harvesting human embryos. Not really sure which side of that argument I fall on, but if we can avoid the argument altogether and concentrate on the science instead, things would move along faster.

    Hopefully these stem cells are as useful as the embryonic ones are.

    -Restil

    • Re:the best news is.... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Saige ( 53303 ) <evil.angela@gma[ ]com ['il.' in gap]> on Wednesday January 23, 2002 @06:44PM (#2890856) Journal
      Well, the big point from this research may be that the only person needed to "donate" the stem cells may be the exact person needing the treatment. If every adult human being has these stem cells, then there is the possibility for a person to grow cells (or organs or such) from their very own cells, with their very own DNA.

      This not only avoids most of the ethical problems completely, it should eliminate any worries about rejection of the new cells, since there isn't a difference between them and the ones already there.

      I hope this turns out to be true, this would be so huge for curing diseases, reparing damage caused by accidents or neglect, and in general really helping to increase human longevity.
      • "This not only avoids most of the ethical problems completely"

        Except for those people against stem cell treatment entirely. I'm kind of afraid it will lead to other "worse" things ("uber-tissue").

      • Ah, but... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by devphil ( 51341 )
        If every adult human being has these stem cells, then there is the possibility for a person to grow cells (or organs or such) from their very own cells, with their very own DNA.

        While this would be an amazing breakthrough, the donation problem would still exist. See, as a diabetic (Type I), growing a replacement pancreas from my own DNA won't help me. The replacement would be just as broken and useless as the one currently propping up my liver (or holding it down, I'm terrible at anatomy). The only thing I get out of this research is plenty of free pancreas-shaped paperweights. ("What a lovely doorstop!" "Thanks, grew it myself.")

        I would need one of the super stem cells from somebody with a working pancreas in order to grow a working one of my own. Presumably this wouldn't suffer from the usual tissue rejection problems of transplants.

        • Re:Ah, but... (Score:2, Informative)

          by drank ( 87996 )
          While this would be an amazing breakthrough, the donation problem would still exist. See, as a diabetic (Type I), growing a replacement pancreas from my own DNA won't help me. The replacement would be just as broken and useless as the one currently propping up my liver

          While your DNA (and mine too - I'm also a type 1) contains markers that predisposed you to get diabetes, there was also a roll of the dice involved. Some unknown environmental factor - most researchers suspect a virus - triggers the autoimmune attack that actually makes one diabetic.

          If you could grow a new pancreas from your own stem cells, it would still contain the markers for diabetes, but it would also contain the same functional, insulin-producing beta cells that you had prior to becoming diabetic. If you never had another autoimmune attack, you'd be non-diabetic for the rest of your life. One quick writeup of this theory can be found in Dr. Bernstein's book [diabetes-n...sugars.com].

          So far as I've read, a pancreas grown from someone else's cells would face the same tissue rejection issues that you see in today's experimental pancreas transplants.

          • I always wondered why I wasn't diabetic until the age of 11 or so... "what was my pancreas /doing/ that first decade" is a question I've always wanted to ask my doctor but could never remember. I guess you answered it. Thanks!

        • See, as a diabetic (Type I), growing a replacement pancreas from my own DNA won't help me. The replacement would be just as broken and useless as the one currently propping up my liver

          I know nothing about diabetes, so I have to ask. If you were to grow a new pancreas from these cells, it would have the same flaw as the one you've got right now; bummer. But, this one is brand new and is not yet a part of your body. Is there anything that can be done with it in this state to try and repair it?

          And as someone else mentioned, they went the first 11 years of their life without requiring insulin injections. Is there a clock on the thing so that it waits a while before deciding to stop working? In which case, would it be feasible to get a new pancreas every decade or so?

      • Not necessarily. The person needing a treatment may need the treatment due to a genetic problem. This problem would exist in all their cells, even the potential stem cells.


        There would need to be a source outside of oneself for such cells in cases where the problem (or a potential problem aside from the one requiring the immediate treatment) is genetic in nature.


        Of course, if there is a large enough supply of such cells within a patient, and they could be properly cultured and propagated, genetic engineering could be attempted to fix certain genetic mutation before going on to use the cells for treatment. Depends on how much time you have to treat the problem and the nature of the genetic abnormality.

  • Patent? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by crotherm ( 160925 )
    Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and though the team has so far published little, a patent application seen by New Scientist shows the team has carried out extensive experiments.

    If this pans out to be what they think they have, I just hope that the patent holders do not charge and arm and a leg for the world to use it. Sure growing organs and such is a longs ways off, but the potential is astounding. Some discoveries should belong to the public domain, like cures and other medical discoveries. And I understand that research costs money, but maybe we as a society would be better off if governments not spend so much on space when there are so many worthwhile medical research programs that arin dire need of funding. And if the governments fund it, then the knowledge could be public.

    • May I point out that if medical science gets much better, we're going to need space research even more than we do now?

      • Re:Patent? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by the_quark ( 101253 )
        May I point out that if medical science gets much better, we're going to need space research even more than we do now?

        This is a common fallacy. No space-based expatration system is going to ship enough people off this planet to make the slightest bit of difference. There are 250,000 new people on this planet, ever single day. That is net of deaths, by the way. You'd have to be able to ship a quarter of a million people off this planet every single day (that's more than the population of New York City every year, by the way) just to keep population growth flat!

        Space-based colonization is probably important to the long-term health of the species. And we need places to grow other than here. But the babies need to be born there, not here if space is going to be part of the solution.

        • No space-based expatration system is going to ship enough people off this planet to make the slightest bit of difference. There are 250,000 new people on this planet, ever single day. That is net of deaths, by the way.

          250,000 people per day is 91.25 million people per year. According to this slide [atag.org], European air travel was 541 million passengers in 1998, almost six times your figure for world population growth.

    • And I understand that research costs money, but maybe we as a society would be better off if governments not spend so much on space when there are so many worthwhile medical research programs that arin dire need of funding.


      You assume that just because the space program would stop recieving funds, medical research would start recieving more. Not only that, but this seems to me to be incredibly short-sighted thinking. What happens if we cut off all funding to space and concentrate on medical advances? Everyone starts living longer, the planet becomes overcrowded very quickly, at which point we would wish we had spent more on space research. Space research is humanitys only chance for long-term survival. Our top priority should be expanding beyond this vulnerable little planet before we get wiped out or wipe ourselves out.

    • First off, if the pun was intentional, very good work. Second, the work would be in the public domain. They're trying to patent their extraction and enrichment process, not the research itself. Third, your logic about cutting off funding for one type of science to push it to another has two main flaws:

      1.) Reducing funding for space does not necessarily translate to extending funding for medical research.
      2.) What if the next big medical discovery happens in the space program? There are so many examples of this that I could go on for days, but in the "pure" sciences (as opposed to applied sciences) very often discoveries are made from which the benefit is not readily apparent, but it soon becomes something that changes the world. Perhaps the cure for cancer comes from experiments done with materials in zero-G or vacuum environments. There's no way to know, so artificially limiting venues of research because they don't have obvious connections to a particular cause is very short-sighted.

      Virg
    • I just hope that the patent holders do not charge and arm and a leg for the world to use it.
      Relax, if they did, you could just fly to Brazil [slashdot.org] to have it done. ;)
  • Forgive me for pointing out the obvious but this is good for several reasons. The one I'm most pleased with is the moral aspect. Assuming this is true we no longer need to farm embryonic humans for stem cells. We can gather them (and possibly in a superior form) from consenting adults.

    This may also help compatibility. If there were any problems with a replacement organ for example then this would possibly lessen the chances of rejection.

    Of course this still leaves moral controversy over what is done with these stem cells - I mean, that whole human cloning thing.
    • Of course this still leaves moral controversy over what is done with these stem cells - I mean, that whole human cloning thing.

      IF human reproductive cloning doesn't involve the destruction of human life, and IF human cloning is safe (no great chance of abnormalities), what's the problem then?

      Anyway, the ability to farm perfectly good tissues and organs out of our own cells would be such a boon to medicine that I can't really see the possibility that it could also be used for reproductive cloning as being that big of a deal.

  • One of the exiting possibilities stem cell research is someday we may be able to make better replacement organs without horking the immune system, understand aging (and someday doing something about it), or any of the pure research that a baseline cell could offer.. It is still way out there, but this nicely side steps most of the religious/ethical/what about the children political nonsense we have with the embryo-based stem cells. Woot! Just getting past the BS is worth a noble prize in my eyes...
    • If by "doing something about" aging you mean helping people be healthy and active until they die at a reasonable age then great. If you mean keeping people alive significantly longer then that's a whole new can of worms. It'd be great in the long run if we can handle the overpopulation this would speed up.
      • This would not cause a significant overpopulation problem. We can assume that these treatments will not be available to the poor, so any population increase would be among the rich. The rich do not reproduce at a rate capable of sustaining their numbers. So the result would be a higher rate of increase in the rich population, perhaps not sufficient to offset the decrease already taking place.

        Having a limited time-span within which wealth can be accumulated is one of the few limits on the ability of the rich to get richer while the poor get poorer. This technology removes that limit, thereby contributing to economic inequity. Inequity is widely believed to be a root cause of political and military instability.

        So, long-term, widespread extreme longevity at high cost would result in an even more comfortable existence for Americans and Western Europeans, accompanied by a commensurate increase in September 11 type incidents.

        This is already the path we find ourselves on. Move along, nothing to see here.
    • One of the exiting possibilities stem cell research is someday we may be able to make better replacement organs without horking the immune system

      For instance, my wife has gastroparesis [gicare.com], a "brain damage" of the nerves in the stomach. She could use a new stomach, but it would be crazy to do a stomach transplant now because of the risk of rejection and immune-supressing drugs. These cells could provide the progenitors required to create a new stomach.

  • Interesting (Score:2, Funny)

    by Ooblek ( 544753 )
    This could put a whole new twist on toys in the genre of Sea Monkeys and Chia pets. Can I grow my boss or my professor in a petri dish and then torture them without any legal ramifications?

  • Finally! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Noodlenose ( 537591 )
    ..and about time.

    Everybody involved in healthcare will breathe a sigh of relief about this discovery. As there are less and less people willing to donate organs, it is time that we get other means of harvesting organs.

    D

  • REUTERS, MARCH 5 The University of Minnesota has been granted a patent for what it calls 'The Ultimate [human] Stem Cell'.

    It is now illegal for humans to generate this cell, or invoke its capabilities to develop into any human tissue, without a license from the University of Minnesota.

    Expectant mothers and fathers, upon confirmation of pregnancy, will be asked to sign a Universal Stem Cell End User License Agreement, and pay an annual license fee.

    Healing of disease, and repair of damaged body tissues, will incur special levies.

    Any use of Universal Stem Cells in any bodily function will result in substantial fines, possible jail terms, and compulsory MRI scans and biopsies for the forced removal of offending cells from the bodies of perpetrators.

    You have been warned!
    • Cute. The USPTO would probably wonder what was so funny about it, though.

      With any luck, they'll just patent the process of filtering the stem cells out (or of creating them, if they can figure out what is is they did) and be very generous with the licensing.

  • Link to the researcher (Score:4, Informative)

    by Beryllium Sphere(tm) ( 193358 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2002 @06:42PM (#2890833) Journal
    http://www.micab.umn.edu/faculty/Verfaillie.html

    and an abstract of one stem cell paper is at
    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cm d= Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=11458512&dopt=Abstrac t

  • "selection process [may actually create] the MAPCs (Score:5, Informative)

    by Cy Guy ( 56083 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2002 @06:42PM (#2890836) Homepage Journal
    "others think the selection process actually creates the MAPCs.

    I don't think there is 'a cell' that is lurking there that can do this. I think that Catherine has found a way to produce a cell that can behave this way," says Neil Theise of New York University Medical School.

    If this turns out to be the case rather than the cell naturally occurring in bone marrow, it has tremendous implications from a patent perspective. Since you cannot patent a naturally occuring object, anyone who could reverse engineer the selection process would be able to produce these cells. But if it is the process itself that transforms otherwise non stem-cell behaving cells into MAPC's then process itself would be patentable and I believe even if you reverse engineered it you would be expected pay royalties. Since claims like "cell lines have been growing for almost two years . . .with no signs of ageing" could herald this find as biomedical fountain of youth, the raoyalties could be astronomical, especially when used for non-life-threatening conditions.

    WOW, who would have thought that the fountain of youth, and a source of infinite free power [cnn.com] would be announced on the same day?
    • Since you cannot patent a naturally occuring object, anyone who could reverse engineer the selection process would be able to produce these cells

      Nope. While they can't patent a naturally occuring object (I think), they most definately can patent the selection process. Reverse Engineering would definately still be a violation of the patent. Now if they could come up with a *different* process that could still extract the cells in question, that *might* not be a violation of the patent (depending on the exact wording of the patent and the similarities between the processes).

      Reverse engineering allows you to get around trade secrets, not patents.

    • Congress could of course set more restrictive limits to patents on things like this if they choose. Remember, the constitution merely gives congress the right to make laws concerning the arts. So, if they want to cap royalties or something, they could. Assuming you could get people to vote for it....its interesting that despite all the talk from some members of congress about drug companies charging too much, not giving poor nations AIDS medecine etc. that no one has tried to just legislate that they cant...
  • I claim Prior art!

  • For Those That Have Been Slashdotted We Salute You (Score:3, Redundant)

    by Peridriga ( 308995 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2002 @06:45PM (#2890857)
    A stem cell has been found in adults that can turn into every single tissue in the body. It might turn out to be the most important cell ever discovered.

    Until now, only stem cells from early embryos were thought to have such properties. If the finding is confirmed, it will mean cells from your own body could one day be turned into all sorts of perfectly matched replacement tissues and even organs.

    If so, there would be no need to resort to therapeutic cloning - cloning people to get matching stem cells from the resulting embryos. Nor would you have to genetically engineer embryonic stem cells (ESCs) to create a "one cell fits all" line that does not trigger immune rejection. The discovery of such versatile adult stem cells will also fan the debate about whether embryonic stem cell research is justified.

    "The work is very exciting," says Ihor Lemischka of Princeton University. "They can differentiate into pretty much everything that an embryonic stem cell can differentiate into."

    Remarkable findings

    The cells were found in the bone marrow of adults by Catherine Verfaillie at the University of Minnesota. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and though the team has so far published little, a patent application seen by New Scientist shows the team has carried out extensive experiments.

    These confirm that the cells - dubbed multipotent adult progenitor cells, or MAPCs - have the same potential as ESCs. "It's very dramatic, the kinds of observations [Verfaillie] is reporting," says Irving Weissman of Stanford University. "The findings, if reproducible, are remarkable."

    At least two other labs claim to have found similar cells in mice, and one biotech company, MorphoGen Pharmaceuticals of San Diego, says it has found them in skin and muscle as well as human bone marrow. But Verfaillie's team appears to be the first to carry out the key experiments needed to back up the claim that these adult stem cells are as versatile as ESCs.

    Verfaillie extracted the MAPCs from the bone marrow of mice, rats and humans in a series of stages. Cells that do not carry certain surface markers, or do not grow under certain conditions, are gradually eliminated, leaving a population rich in MAPCs. Verfaillie says her lab has reliably isolated the cells from about 70 per cent of the 100 or so human volunteers who donated marrow samples.

    Indefinite growth

    The cells seem to grow indefinitely in culture, like ESCs. Some cell lines have been growing for almost two years and have kept their characteristics, with no signs of ageing, she says.

    Given the right conditions, MAPCs can turn into a myriad of tissue types: muscle, cartilage, bone, liver and different types of neurons and brain cells. Crucially, using a technique called retroviral marking, Verfaillie has shown that the descendants of a single cell can turn into all these different cell types - a key experiment in proving that MAPCs are truly versatile.

    Also, Verfaillie's group has done the tests that are perhaps the gold standard in assessing a cell's plasticity. She placed single MAPCs from humans and mice into very early mouse embryos, when they are just a ball of cells. Analyses of mice born after the experiment reveal that a single MAPC can contribute to all the body's tissues.

    MAPCs have many of the properties of ESCs, but they are not identical. Unlike ESCs, for example, they do not seem to form cancerous masses if you inject them into adults. This would obviously be highly desirable if confirmed. "The data looks very good, it's very hard to find any flaws," says Lemischka. But it still has to be independently confirmed by other groups, he adds.

    Fundamental questions

    Meanwhile, there are some fundamental questions that must be answered, experts say. One is whether MAPCs really form functioning cells.

    Stem cells that differentiate may express markers characteristic of many different cell types, says Freda Miller of McGill University. But simply detecting markers for, say, neural tissue does not prove that a stem cell really has become a working neuron.

    Verfaillie's findings also raise questions about the nature of stem cells. Her team thinks that MAPCs are rare cells present in the bone marrow that can be fished out through a series of enriching steps. But others think the selection process actually creates the MAPCs.

    "I don't think there is 'a cell' that is lurking there that can do this. I think that Catherine has found a way to produce a cell that can behave this way," says Neil Theise of New York University Medical School.

    19:00 23 January 02
  • If this turns out to be true, it would be a remarkable find. But as the article points out, this is only a preliminary report, and "the team has so far published little." They will need to carry out extensive tests and publish a lot more research before anything conclusive can be determined.

    It is interesting, but I wish researchers wouldn't jump the gun and announce "findings" before research is complete. (Cold fusion, anyone?)

  • Moral clarity (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DaoudaW ( 533025 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2002 @06:51PM (#2890889)
    The article is kinda breathy, especially for New Scientist - but

    I hate to disillusion you, but New Scientist is well-known for their sensationalism. If this were Nature, Science, or even Scientific American, Hemo's comment would make sense. Don't take me wrong I've enjoyed reading New Scientist for a number of years, but its niche is tabloid-style, scientific journalism. It is not a scientific journal.

    If this research is valid, it is a huge breakthrough. But it means that human cloning will have to be argued for its own sake, rather than it somehow being necessary for growing spare kidneys. My concern with this is that Bush, et al, will use it to shut down cloning research altogether; they've never seemed to have any other use for cloning. On the other hand, it may allow clarity on the morality of cloning.

    • Re:Moral clarity (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Mr_Matt ( 225037 )
      Exactly...I wonder if Hemos didn't mean to say

      The artice is kinda breathy, even for New Scientist

      :)

      If this research is valid, it is a huge breakthrough. But it means that human cloning will have to be argued for its own sake, rather than it somehow being necessary for growing spare kidneys. My concern with this is that Bush, et al, will use it to shut down cloning research altogether; they've never seemed to have any other use for cloning. On the other hand, it may allow clarity on the morality of cloning.

      And this is a great point...it seems like the reason cloning research has been allowed to go forward is because of the potential gains resulting from non-fully cloned results. The bigger question, I think, is this: how does this modify the age-old dispute between unfettered scientific research and constant restraints on that research by people with non-scientific agendas to push? Can this breakthrough provide a clear method to delineate "good" cloning research from "bad" cloning research?
  • Yet more evidence that we will have the ability to make ourselfs immortal in this lifetime. Well, at least the rich will be able to live forever. This is the kind of research I would be investing in if I had more then pocket change.
  • [note: bitchslap comming]

    but if this is true, which needs to be studied more,

    Needs to be studied more? Of course it does. Who ever said they weren't going to?

    Thank you for the wonderful insight. If it's true there will be more research than, well, you can shake a chromosome at. If it's false... who cares?
  • "Yes, I only need a few more aborted fetus' and my stem cells would have cloned me my own Shakeys Pizza !"

  • <controversial opinion>Thank the pro-life contingent for this. Yes, them. Because of the hard-line stance of many people that human life shouldn't be devalued through experimentation, there is naturally going to be a lot more research into finding adult cells that do not have the controversy attached.

    Sometimes sticking to principles and not taking the easy ways out (e.g., manufacturing embryoes for experimentation) leads to very nice results.

    </controversial opinion>

  • 'Tis sweet... but there's a big problem I could forsee (dunno if the article addressed this... I kinda jumped through it...)...

    If we went and did testing on this with humans, how would we be sure to inhibit the reproduction of said tissue? I'm just wondering if these tissues would reproduce the same way that embryos would.

    If it did, then it's quite possible that we could eventually replace _all_ the organs in the body (With pretty much the exception of the brain) and thusly we now have a theoretical "fountain of youth" (Any bio nuts wanna call me on this one? I'm not certain how plausible this would be... haven't taken biology in years...). If it doesn't, how can we be certain that growth inhibition wouldn't be lost somewhere in here, and thusly this kind of transplant would end up giving us happy little tumors? Especially if you're transplanting something like a heart, it'd be a Bad Thing to have your heart itself turn into a gigantic tumor...

    (Excuse the amateur biologist in me... I'm just wondering...)

  • End of debate (Score:2, Interesting)

    by $pacemold ( 248347 )
    MAPCs have many of the properties of ESCs, but they are not identical. Unlike ESCs, for example, they do not seem to form cancerous masses if you inject them into adults.
    If this is true, it makes MAPCs much better for organ cloning than ESCs: no immune reaction, less risk of cancer, an no ethical problems.

  • This is GOOD NEWS (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mcrbids ( 148650 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2002 @07:15PM (#2891009) Journal
    One of my sons has type 1 diabetes, heretofore an incurable disease. We have to test his blood at least 3-4 times per day, and continuously administer injections. It's a hassle, it's expensive, and despite our best efforts we know that the inevitable swings of blood sugar can shorten his life, and lead to severe health complications.

    There IS a cure for type 1 diabetes - recently in Edmonton, CA they "cured" about a dozen people by injecting islet cells (those that produce insulin) into the liver, along with some mild anti-immune drugs.

    The anti-immune drugs are needed because the islet cells implanted are foreign.

    The problem is that there aren't enough extractable islet cells in all viable cadavers in this country to cure even 1% of the diabetic population.

    Under our current conservative presidency, stem-cell research involving embryos is at a near stand-still. (Only existing lines can be used, new ones cannot be created)

    But if these stem cells can be trained to behave as islet cells, then my 13 year old son may well be effectively cured before he turns 20.

    This is good news!

  • This is excellent science journalism. I'm glad to see the concerns of more skeptical scientists covered in such a balanced fashion. Most of the time, journalists, including those at the New Scientist, breeze past highly important caveats in favor of sensationalism - I'm sure we'll see this story repeated in Pro Life literature, for example, without qualifications. Kudos to Sylvia Westphal (author of the article.)

    The fact that the claims being made appear on a patent application instead of in peer-reviewed research makes me extremely skeptical. Showing such a patent application to a member of the press - but not publishing - make me even more so. A great many people (I resist the temptation to post links) involved in Biotech make grandiose claims that they cannot really back up; the huge potential rewards have certainly led to compromises of scientific ethics in the past.

    Just because a scientist is fishing for venture captialists does NOT mean that she is doing bad science; it does raise legitimate suspicion about her (Dr. Catherine Verfaillie [umn.edu], who did the work) research.

    The "agelessness" and expression of unusual combinations of extracellular markers mentioned in the article are also features common to cancer cells. It is entirely possible that the process of extracting the bone marrow has merely selected out non-tumerogenic, precancerous cells. Such cells, which may very well substitute for stem cells anyway, but probably don't, might also spread through a mouse embryo into which they were injected.
  • Posit:
    This process works, exact replicas of human organs can be grown and implanted into patients with phenominal success.

    Effect:
    Millions of americans decide that quitting smoking, losing weight, and all manner of healthy activity are not worth the trouble because science can simply cure them.

    Result:
    Health care costs skyrocket. General levels of health decrease.

    So I ask...how would we prevent this? Make smokers pay for thier own lung transplants? Alcholoics pay for their own liver?

    It makes for an interesting question.

    • Good point. I think your hypo will occur and millions of Americans (and ROTW) will reward their poor lifestyle decisions with expensive medical fixes, leading to skyrocketing medical/insurance costs. Meanwhile, millions of other Americans are consciously choosing healthy lifestyles not only for the benefits of reduced frequency of illness and reduced medical/insurance costs, but for the benefit of feeling better 24 hours a day.

      I think the gap between the two will widen and become more obvious. Hopefully, the problem will beget its own solution as people abandon the endless cycle (well, endless until death...) of bad lifestyle decision followed by painful/expensive medical procedures/drugs and complications, and seek a lifestyle that benefits the body and mind with maximum health and enjoyment.

  • Finally! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Zen Mastuh ( 456254 )

    I can have a second penis. Thank you science!

  • Slightly OT: The future with Stem Cells (Score:3, Interesting)

    by XBL ( 305578 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2002 @07:56PM (#2891179)
    I think it's rather obvious that stel cells are eventually going to be conquered and put to wide usage in medicine... maybe in the near future, or maybe in the far future.

    Right now I am 22.. going on 80. In my lifetime, I think that it will be possible for people to extend their lives out as far as they want to, if they have the money.

    Basically, I see a time where the rich people will be able to remain ageless, living possibly hundreds of years. Meanwhile, average people would live a normal human life span.

    Can you imagine what a social conflict something like this would make? In the past, there have been some very large social class differences, but imagine a gap where one group remains ageless, and another is jealously ageing and dying.

    I think that I'm going to start saving my money now...

  • Wild coincidence (Score:3, Informative)

    by rw2 ( 17419 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2002 @08:04PM (#2891238) Homepage
    I just got out of a colloqium presented by one of the researchers and she was careful to point out that they do not have cells that can fully differentiate, just that they have cells that they have *so far* been able to turn into anything they want. They haven't tried everything yet.

  • Multipotent Cells a Matter of Process (Score:3, Interesting)

    by bonoboy ( 98001 ) on Thursday January 24, 2002 @12:37AM (#2892562) Homepage Journal
    It states in the article that certain people believe the cells are produced by the process, not that they already exist and are simply refined.

    Is it just me, or was there news in the past year or so from people that had found that making cells dormant on minimal media (the same way they prepare cells for cloning) actually made them multipotent anyway? Does anyone else remember this?
  • Why grow brain cells when you can grow...the Ultimate Steak! Imagine growing meat in a vat instead of hacking up steer or chickens.

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