Investor's Business Daily, April 11th, 2007
Bioethics: Congress is debating competing bills on expanding funding for embryonic stem-cell research, but British researchers aren't waiting. Using patients' own stem cells, they've weaned them off insulin injections.
Despite the fact that George W. Bush is the only president to have spent federal funds on embryonic stem-cell research (Clinton spent zero), and that private embryonic stem cell research (ESCR) is not restricted, the myth persists that the only thing standing between us and a bevy of miracle cures is a cabal of right-wing Bible thumpers led by Dubya himself.
Thanks in part to deceptive campaign ads that politicized the issue, such as those featuring Parkinson's sufferer Michael J. Fox and run in key Senate races, Democrats gained control of the Senate. Now Majority Leader Harry Reid is pushing a bill expanding federal ESCR funding beyond existing stem-cell lines, including the use of embryos created specifically for research purposes.
It's a bill virtually identical to the one on which Bush used his first and only veto, and he has promised to veto this one as well. According to a statement issued by the White House: "The administration believes that research on alternative sources of stem cells is extremely promising and provides robust opportunities to advance science without compelling American taxpayers to participate in ongoing destruction of human embryos."
An alternative bill offered by Republican Sens. Norm Coleman of Minnesota and Johnny Isakson of Georgia would allow research using embryos that have gone past the time when they could successfully be implanted in the womb or have died during fertility treatments. But Reid spokesman Jim Manley says his boss' legislation "is the only bill that provides real hope to patients."
As we've said before, Reid's position that ESCR is the "most promising" form of stem cell research and the only one worth pursuing is false. There have been no successful ESC therapies or even any clinical trials. But patients are actually being treated using adult stem cells and cells from umbilical cord blood and other sources.
In a breakthrough clinical trial published Wednesday in the "Journal of the American Medical Association," a team of Brazilian and American scientists led by Julio Voltarelli of the University of Sao Paulo report that young patients with Type 1 diabetes used stem cells drawn from their own blood to stop taking insulin injections after their body resumed producing the hormone naturally.
Fifteen Brazilian diabetics aged 14 to 31 who'd been diagnosed in the prior six weeks were selected. After stem cells were harvested from their blood, they underwent a mild form of chemotherapy to kill the white blood cells damaging the pancreas, which produces insulin. The stem cells were then re-injected into the patients.
Richard Burt, co-author of the study from Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, reports that all but two of the volunteers in the trial did not need daily insulin injections as long as three years after receiving the therapy, known as autologous hematopoietic stem cell transplantation.
It may not roll off the tongue like "embryonic," but it's an actual treatment using actual stem cells that has already produced results with individuals having a range of auto-immune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn's disease and Lupus. "It will probably be five to eight years before we see a treatment being widely available," Burt says.
It'll probably take longer than that for mainstream media and grandstanding politicians to admit ESCR isn't the only form of stem-cell research and certainly not the "most promising." This study follows another landmark clinical trial last November in which British scientists reported that stem cells extracted from a patient's own bone marrow could repair organ damage in heart attack victims.
As long as Reid et al. want to fund promising research, we suggest they send an appropriation to the Brits.
Copyright 2007 Investor's Business Daily, Inc.
