YOU MEAN, CHRISTOPHER REEVE MIGHT NOT HAVE GOTTEN UP AND WALKED?:

Tracking the Uncertain Science of Growing Heart Cells: A heart treatment using stem cells of bone marrow has touched off sharp differences as to whether it is ready to be taken to people. (NICHOLAS WADE, 3/14/05, NY Times)

In April 2001, researchers from the New York Medical College and the National Institutes of Health announced electrifying news for heart surgeons and their patients: stem cells from bone marrow, injected into the damaged hearts of mice, had morphed into the special cardiac muscle cells that the body cannot replace after a heart attack.

The researchers held out the hope that the procedure could be applied to people, too. The findings underlined a basic premise of stem cell therapy, that it will work before the cells and their elaborate control systems are fully understood - just put stem cells in the right place in the body, and they will do the rest.

But four years later, the treatment has yet to demonstrate whether it will fulfill its promise. And it has touched off a sharp difference of views among clinical doctors as to whether the therapy is ready to be taken to people.

Ten human trials of the marrow-to-heart approach have been completed in clinics around the world, all but one with positive results. But the overall degree of improvement in the patients' heart function has been modest. At the same time, the original research that provided the rationale for many of the trials has come under severe criticism from scientists who have tried without success to reproduce it.

The approach, if it works, would be a leading example of regenerative medicine, the idea that the best way to repair the body is not with strong drugs or the surgeon's scalpel but with the body's own system of cells and signaling molecules. Regenerative medicine should work, in principle, on the host of diseases that result as aging organs and tissues fail to maintain the vigor of youth.

The difficulties of the marrow-to-heart therapy do not dash the hopes for regenerative medicine or imply failure for the stem cell research financing set up by states like California and New Jersey. But they do suggest that successful stem cell treatments, whether with adult cells or ones derived from embryos, may require many years to come to fruition.

Won't stop folks from pissing away money and the soul of their society on it though.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 14, 2005 5:13 PM