Monkey clones unlikely to bring new care
Staff and agencies
16 November, 2007
By MALCOLM RITTER, AP Science Writer Wed Nov 14, 6:07 PM ET
NEW YORK - Gleaning stem cells from cloned monkey embryos, as a team
of Oregon researchers has done, is an impressive step. But it
probably won`t lead to medical treatments any time soon.
Another hurdle is the inefficiency of the process. Even if the method
described by scientists Wednesday works in humans, it would demand
too much of a precious resource — women`s unfertilized eggs.
The process used in the new experiment is "quite inefficient,
Shoukhrat Mitalipov of the Oregon National Primate Research Center in
Portland told reporters Wednesday.
If further work can get that down to maybe five to 10 eggs per stem
cell batch, "we will be closer to clinical applications,
said.
But then there`s another issue — showing that such stem cells really
can be used to treat diseases safely. Mitalipov said he plans to do
diabetes studies in monkeys.
The new work was published online Wednesday by the scientific journal
Nature. The success was reported earlier this year at a research
meeting in Australia, where it received limited media coverage. The
results were given new attention Tuesday by a London newspaper, The
Independent.
Mitalipov`s team merged skin cells of a 9-year-old rhesus macaque
male with unfertilized monkey eggs that had the DNA removed. The
eggs, now operating with DNA from the skin cells, grew into early
embryos in the laboratory. Stem cells were recovered from these
embryos.
Mitalipov said separate experiments obtained monkey stem cells from a
different process called parthenogenesis, in which an egg grows into
an early embryo without any genetic contribution from a male. The
stem cells were genetic matches to the females that produced the
eggs, he said, and early experiments suggest stem cells derived this
way may someday prove useful for treating disease in women.
In an e-mail, the journal cited the highly publicized 2004 fraud that
came out of South Korea, where researchers led by Hwang woo-Suk
claimed to have produced stem cells from a cloned human embryo.
The verification study, by David Cram and others at the Monash
University in Australia, used DNA analysis of the male macaque, the
two monkeys whose eggs were used to create embryos, and the stem
cells. The result "demonstrates beyond any doubt" that the stem cells
came from cloned embryos, the Australians wrote in their Nature
paper.
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On the Net:
Nature: http://www.nature.
http://www.onelocal
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StemCells subscribers may also be interested in these sites:
Children's Neurobiological Solutions
http://www.CNSfoundation.org/
Cord Blood Registry
http://www.CordBlood.com/at.cgi?a=150123
The CNS Healing Group
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CNS_Healing
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