Stem Cell research using umbilical cord blood and adult stem cells - the successful ethical alternative

With the news that using adult stem cells may be more fruitful in treating disease than embryonic stem cells, there
seems little need for this destruction of tiny humans for scientific research. The adult cells can be taken from the adult patient,
and returned after treatment, thus removing the possibility of rejection. (See the international journal Science 2 April 1999**SLQ EBSCO online fulltext article).
This page is devoted to successful stem cell research that is ethically free of embryo killing.

•  2005 A British woman paralysed in a riding accident has regained some movement after stem cells from her nose were transplanted into her spine. The operation took place in Portugal under the direction of Dr Carlos Lima, who has used the technique on 34 patients. "All of our patients have some kind of recovery," he says. We have no doubts about sensory recovery and some voluntary motor recovery. They move and feel below the lesions [on the spine] as never before. And there is even some bladder and bowel control." The technique involves extracting olfactory ensheathing cells from the upper nasal cavity. This area contains the body's only surface neurons and is a source of nerve stem cells. Dr Lima prefers these to embryonic stem cells for ethical and for practical reasons. "Mother Nature made embryonic stem cells to proliferate and adult stem cells to replace and repair. To defy Mother Nature's laws is, at least, dangerous," he says. ~ London Telegraph, Dec 6. Source: BioEdge newsletter.

• 2005 A type of adult stem cell has been isolated from bone marrow that shows all the characteristics of human embryonic stem cells. A team of researchers at Boston's Tufts University have found cells that come from adult donors that can change into many, if not all of the different types of tissue in the human body.The scientists used specialized cell-sorting machines to obtain different types of adult stem cells from the bone marrow of three donors. It was previously thought that only embryonic cells could produce this.The cells were tested on rats with heart damage after heart attacks.  Once inserted, some of the cells became new heart muscle and tissue, as adult stem cells have done before in numerous successful experiments. However, the cells also turned into new blood vessels to support the ailing hearts.Treated rats had more than twice the number of blood vessels and less scar tissue than those of the control group.
  Tufts cardiologist Dr. Douglas W. Losordo said, "I think embryonic stem cells are going to fade in the rearview mirror of adult stem cells." He said that bone marrow "is like a repair kit. Nature provided us with these tools to repair organ damage." Dr. Losordo added that the newly discovered bone marrow cells are easy to grow and maintain in the lab. "We've got freezers full of these things now," he said.They wrote about their discovery in the February issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation.
• Minnesota researchers have combined two cord blood units from different donors for transplantation into adult leukemia patients. While stem cell transplants using umbilical cord blood have become standard treatment for blood disorders in children, they have not been available for adults-until now. The Minnesota project will apparently change that. The study will be published in the February issue of "Blood," the journal of the American Society of Hematology. Read the complete story.
  
•  2005 Canadian researchers have found a new source of stem cells: a part of a human umbilical cord which was previously thought to have no value.The stem cells are located in the connective tissue surrounding the blood vessels in the umbilical cord. The cells can be removed and grown in a few weeks to offer an abundant supply of additional cells, according to John Davies, a professor of biomaterials at the University of Toronto. "You can anticipate using these as a source of cells to help re-grow that bone ... or connective tissue in the knee ... which has been damaged in an accident," Davies told the Toronto Star. The Canadian study has been published in the February issue of the journal “Stem Cells."
• 2005 The Brazilian government has announced it will fund one of the world's largest studies on stem cells and heart disease.Brazilian research will involve drawing the patients' own stem cells from bone marrow, cultivating them and re-inserting them to repair damaged heart tissue. The government is seeking an effective treatment for cardiac patients that can be reliable enough to be covered by the public health care system.   Further Developments in Stem Cell Research to Treat Heart Attack and Fatal Neural Disorder http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2005/jan/05010605.html
• 2004 In the issue of Arthritis and Rheumatism, Aug. 2004, a 52 year old woman with rheumatoid arthritis in 28 joints was treated with adult stem cells. Within a year her morning stiffness ceased and the researchers concluded that the procedure "may be performed safely without the development of graph vs host disease or serious infection, and results in marked resolution of the disease manifestations of rheumatoid arthritis."
• In another study reported in the Journal Cell, researchers at Rockefeller University have found cells in skin hair follicles that have the ability to create new cells of different types of tissues (i.e. are stem cells).
• 2002 Montreal, Canada -- In what might be a world first, doctors at Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal transfused a woman suffering from leukemia with the umbilical-cord blood of her baby daughter. Seven months later, 27-year-old Patrizia Durante is in complete remission and credits her daughter with saving her life.
  
"I gave my daughter life, and then she gave mine back," Ms. Durante said yesterday, cradling 13-month-old Victoria.
"It's a miracle. She was meant to be born to save me."
Umbilical cord blood is rich in hemopoietic stem cells -- the kind of cells that can rebuild a blood system damaged by heavy doses of chemotherapy. In Ms. Durante's case, the stem cells regenerated her blood system and
destroyed the residual cancer cells in her body.
"We are now in an era where we are realizing scientifically and medically that we have sources of stem cells that can become other tissues and can be used therapeutically," Dr. Laneuville said. "And the most accessible source and the one we're throwing in the garbage all the time are these cord cells."
At the time, doctors were looking for a suitable donor for a bone-marrow transplant, even though Victoria's umbilical-cord blood had been frozen in liquid nitrogen. But by last March, Ms. Durante was severely ill and she
could not wait any longer for a bone-marrow transplant. Dr. Laneuville decided to infuse her with Victoria's cord blood, although the procedure was risky because Durante's body might have rejected the blood. Ideally, individuals should be infused with their own banked cord blood.Victoria's blood, however, was only a half-match, carrying her mother's
genes as well as her father's.
"But in this case, the incompatibility -- that is, the genes that the baby's dad contributed -- theoretically could have been very beneficial in this transplant," Dr. Laneuville said."Part of the blood cells include the immune system. There was the possibility that the immune system of the baby may identify the leukemia as foreign and attack. That's something that's beneficial."
The baby's cord blood did exactly that to her mother's leukemia. The stem cells also flooded Ms. Durante's bloodstream and stuck to her bone marrow-- the part of the body that manufactures the blood -- and began rebuilding her blood system. "So what is circulating in her veins now is actually her baby's blood," hesaid. "She has her baby's blood system in her at the present time." Source:   Montreal Gazette; October 26, 2002

• Scientists are also studying whether stem cells derived from cord blood can repair damaged heart and brain tissue. Preliminary results from animal studies are promising. Doctors are now carrying out clinical trials on humans in the United States and Europe to determine whether such stem cells can repair damaged heart muscle.

• As reported in April 2000 in the journal Science, French scientists restored the immune systems of 3 infants with severe combined immunodeficiency (the “bubble boy syndrome”) using gene therapy with the patients’ own bone marrow stem cells.  Researchers removed stem cells from the infants' bone marrow, added a working copy of the gene to the cells' DNA, and injected the repaired stem cells back into the infants.  Since the procedure used the patients' own cells, there was no problem of transplant rejection.  After treatment, the numbers and function of the patients' immune cells were restored to normal levels, and the children were living at home and developing normally with no further treatment (M. Cavazzana-Calvo, et al., "Gene Therapy of Human Severe Combined Immunodeficiency (SCID)-X1 Disease," Science 288, 669-672, April 28, 2000**).

• In Neuroscience magazine August 2000 researchers reported adult stem cells extracted from adult bone marrow can grow into neural stem cells, potentially useful to repair damaged nerve cells in the spine and brain.(CNN, August 15, 2000)
• Scientists have turned skin cells from cows into beating heart cells that could be used to repair a damaged heart. If perfected, it would sidestep therapeutic cloning, which involves the creation and destruction of human embryos to make tissue for repairs to the body. ( 2/24/01)
• Also, a new procedure by an American subsidiary of the British Biotech company PPL Therapuetics, which takes and stores a few dozen millilitres of blood from the umbilical cord after birth, yields a rich source of stem cells. If the child develops a disease such as leukemia, the cells can be used to provide healthy blood, with no risk of rejection, and no ethical problems. Chief medical officer, Professor Liam Donaldson, called this ability to make a patient's own tissue without the ethical complications of destroying cloned embryos, the "Holy Grail".(Brisbane Sunday Mail report by Helen McCabe 4 March 2001**)
• UCLA scientists have figured out a way to harvest stem cells from fat removed during cosmetic surgery. Researchers at University of California succeeded in converting adult stem cells from human fat tissue into bone, muscle and cartilage cells.(TheTimes, April 10, 2001)**
• A team of doctors at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston recently performed the first known adult stem cell transplant to treat a rare skin disorder called scleromyxedema. The disorder is characterized by waxy, stiff, thickened skin. In the Houston patient, it had progressed so far that the skin on his face had a "cobblestone appearance," and he could not close his eyelids completely or eat. The doctors first collected stem cells from the patient's own bone marrow, and then purposely destroyed his immune system with chemotherapy. They then transplanted his stem cells back into his system in order to allow the cells to reconstruct his immune system. Three months after the transplant, the patient's face does not have thecobblestone appearance anymore, and he can now close his eyes and open his mouth. This is another example of highly encouraging results from adult stem cells in clinical work on human patients.

• Corneal grafts grown from a patient's own stem cells will be trialled by eye surgeons for the first time in 2001. Tissue engineers from QUT have developed a way of growing new corneas in the laboratory, just like skin grafts.Researcher Damien Harkin, having spent 2 years perfecting the technique, will now trial taking a tiny piece of tissue from the patient's good eye, culturing it in the laboratory into a sheet of corneal cells, and grafting this onto the patient's other, damaged eye.The aim is to get a better compatibility than from donor grafts, and to heal inflammation in the damaged eye. (Rockhampton Morning Bulletin Aug 6th, 2001)
• PARIS, Aug 13, 2001 (AFP)Canadian scientists had isolated stem cells in the skin of rodents that can generate neural tissue, muscle or fat cells, the science magazine Nature Cell Biology said.A similar application from human skin could play an important role in repairing damaged human tissue, it said.
• SINGAPORE,Aug 14,2001 (AFP) -   Singapore scored a medical first when doctors successfully treated a five-year-old Malaysian boy for thalassaemia   -- a genetic blood disease -- by transplanting blood from the umbilical cord of an unrelated donor.   Oh Tze Sun, a Malaysian-Chinese, was given the cord blood on July 3 and tests taken 28 days later showed he was now producing normal red cell corpuscles unlike in thalassaemia where the cells were pale and small.
• UNITED KINGDOM Daily Telegraph, 18 September 2001   A three-year-old boy has been cured of a fatal disease by the use of stem cells extracted from his sister's placenta. Tom Stretch suffered from chronic granulomatous, an inherited defect of the white blood cells which would probably have led to his death in his 20s. No suitable bone marrow donor could be found, so doctors at Newcastle-upon-Tyne general hospital in   England took stem cells from the placenta of his sister Hanna, who was free from the condition, after she was born last November and transplanted them into Tom. http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2001/09/18/nsave18.xml
• University of Pittsburgh doctors have cured Keone Penn of fatal sickle cell blood disease, using adult stem cells from umbilical cord blood. At 11. Keone had already had a stroke and been in need of many transfusions. He was in excruciating pain, and may have had only 5 years to live. In 1998, after intensive chemptherapy to destroy his bad blood, Keone was injected with the stem cells, which went to his bone marrow to create new blood. They changed his entire blood type from type O to type B without rejection. A year later, with no sickle cells left, he is considered cured.Using adult stem cells from umbilical cord blood does not require an exact match, unlike a bone marrow transplant.(Reported in News Weekly Dec 15, 2001, p.5)
• A German man after suffering a heart attack, has had his heart repaired using stem cells taken from his own pelvis. see http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_382867.html
• Wed 10 Apr 2002 http://news.ninemsn.com.au/nnhwatch/story_29391.asp  Source: National Nine News
  
Adult stem cell therapy helps heart patients-"This trial is the first of its kind in the world …adult stem cells derived from the patient's own bone marrow and injected into the heart," said Dr Suki Thambar from John Hunter Hospital.
 
• March 20, 2002 Just this week it was announced that some of Australia's leading adult stem cell researchers have made a breakthrough that they hope could lead to an eventual cure for motor neurone disease (also known as ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease).The Melbourne-based researchers said they had managed to isolate a stem cell in the brain which continues to give rise to new nerve cells.Although a cure may still be years away, said researcher Dr. Rod Rietze, the discovery was "a major breakthrough." Source:   Cybercast News Service; March 20, 2002

• Nerve cells taken from paraplegic patient's nose used in spinal cord regeneration trial by Griffith University and Brisbane's PA hospital. "Nerve cells used in spinal cord regeneration trial" online article at News Weekly July 27, 2002 

• Parkinson's disease treated with stem cells from brain American researchers claim that they have treated a man's Parkinson's  disease by re-inserting cultured stem cells taken from his brain. The Cedars-Sinai medical center, Los Angeles, described the procedure as experimental but claimed that the cells had helped restore production of dopamine so that the patient's symptoms had been alleviated. Questions have been raised about the research but it does provide an ethical alternative to the use of embryonic stem cells. [BBC, 9 April]

The Pro-life Infonet report on "Covering Up the Promise of Adult Stem Cells", an article by Michael Fumento in the National Review; March 28, 2002, states that as of 2001," there were over 30 different anti-cancer applications alone from non-embryonic stem cells, all performed on humans and all appearing in peer-reviewed medical literature. Over 100 non-embryonic-stem-cell experiments in animals that have shown success against a tremendous variety of diseases.In fact marrow transplants,a routine procedure since the early 1990s, is actually the transplantation and differentiation of marrow stem cells. Umbilical-cord stem-cell therapy began a few years later and now some 70 different diseases, primarily forms of leukemia, are treated with these stem cells.
In December 2001, Osiris Corp. of Baltimore announced that the NES [non-enbryonic stem] cells it's been working with provoke no immune reaction going from one animal to another and even one species to another. This is even as ES-cell researchers are admitting it could be quite some time before they engineer out the protein from ES cells that makes them universally rejected. They also have to solve the nasty tendency of ES cells to form malignancies. NES cells don't cause this problem.

Scientists are discovering NES cells in virtually every part of the body they look, including not only marrow, placentas, and skin but also blood, brains, spinal cords, dental pulp, muscles, blood vessels, corneas, retinas, livers, pancreases, and liposuctioned fat.  They're finding they can convert each of these into many other types of cells. Fat stem cells, for example, have been made into cartilage, blood, and bone cells, but also into mature fat cells that could be used to fill in traumatized tissue."

The only note of caution with the use of umbilical cord blood  would be if parents had several embryos created as possibly free of a certain condition, screened these to find the best match to treat an older sibling's medical condition, and only implanted that "designer" embryo, discarding the others.
Other useful sources of stem cells include bone marrow, which can be drawn at any time, and so does not  require banking.

Web links:
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. http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns9999701 http://archive.newscientist.com

  Research using adult stem cellshttp://www.cogforlife.org/stemnoembyos.htm
   Current and potential applications of adult stem cells http://www.stemcellresearch.org/
   NIH guidelines misleading on adult stem cellshttp://www.cogforlife.org/stemadult.htm
  Adult Stem Cells More Promising, More Successful http://www.stemcellresearch.org/info/quotes2.htm
  Navy Cures Radiation Sickness with Adult Stem Cells by Terence P. Jeffrey July 30, 2001
   http://humanevents.org/articles/07-30-01/jeffrey.html 
 

Journal articles:
Clarke, D L  Johansson, C B Frisen J et al. "Generalised potential of adult neural stem cells" Science 2000, 288,
pp1600-1663. **
Vogel, G.            "Can old cells learn new tricks?" Science 25 Feb 2000 p. 1418-1419 **
Hall, Stephen S.   "Adult Stem Cells" Technology Review magazine     November 2001
                             (http://www.technologyreview.com/magazine/nov01/hall.asp) **
M. Cavazzana-Calvo, et al., "Gene Therapy of Human Severe Combined Immunodeficiency (SCID)-X1 Disease," Science 288, 669-672, April 28, 2000 **
Feasel, et al,       "Complete Remission of Scleromyxedema Following Autologous Stem Cell Transplantation", Archives of Dermatology; August 2001, Vol. 137, No. 8, pp. 1071-1072. **SLQ Health and Wellness online fulltext article