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Stem cell triumph opens door for cures

Human stem cells have for the first time been obtained from an Australian embryo.

The controversial achievement has been made by scientists at a Sydney fertility clinic, Sydney IVF, using a surplus embryo donated by a Sydney couple who had undergone IVF treatment.

Human embryonic stem cells can turn into any type of body tissue and doctors hope they will eventually revolutionise treatments for spinal cord injuries and diseases such as juvenile diabetes and Parkinson's.

However, moral concerns have been raised because their extraction involves the destruction of embryos that are just days old.

The medical director of Sydney IVF, Robert Jansen, said yesterday that the team's development of a human embryonic stem cell line, or colony, on its first attempt was world class and reflected the use of a very high quality embryo. "This is a terrific moment for us."

The clinic's research could not only help in development of new therapies for incurable diseases, but lead to improved IVF rates through better understanding of embryo development, Professor Jansen said. "The potential of stem cell research is boundless."

The embryonic stem cell research had cost the clinic $500,000 so far, and it had no government grants, he said. These costs would eventually be recouped by the clinic charging a commercial fee for other researchers to use its cell lines.

After a long and heated debate on stem cells in 2002, federal MPs decided in a conscience vote to pass legislation allowing destructive research on IVF embryos created before April 5, 2002.

It took 16 months, until April this year, for a new National Health and Medical Research Council committee to issue licences for such research, a move described at the time by Senator Brian Harradine as issuing "licences to kill". Sydney IVF was awarded four licences, including the first one in the country to extract human embryo stem cells.

The Sydney couple, who had completed their family, donated three frozen embryos to be used for stem cell extraction. One did not survive thawing, and the third did not yield a cell line.

Professor Jansen said that teams from overseas had often used between 20 to 100 embryos to grow one embryonic stem cell line.

Sydney IVF had an advantage because it was the first clinic in the world to routinely grow IVF embryos for five days, rather than the usual three, before genetically testing them and then freezing them.

This meant that the embryos were already at the stage, called the blastocyst stage, which had to be reached before stem cells could be successfully extracted.

US researchers were the first in the world to obtain human embryonic stem cells, in 1998, followed by an Australian team led by Professor Alan Trounson of Monash University in 1999, using IVF embryos donated in Singapore.

A second licence to extract stem cells from surplus IVF embryos was issued earlier this month to Melbourne IVF and the Melbourne company Stem Cell Sciences.

Posted by thinkum at June 23, 2004 04:12 PM