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Tag: stem cell research
Aborted Stem Cells Produced Trump's 'Miracle Cure' For Covid-19

Aborted Stem Cells Produced Trump's 'Miracle Cure' For Covid-19

When Donald Trump went to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for treatment for the coronavirus, he benefited from a treatment that's not yet available to the public.

The antibody treatment from Regeneron, which Trump is now claiming "cured" him without evidence, has yet to be approved by the Federal Drug Administration. It's also derived from stem cell research.

That might be unremarkable but for the fact that Trump's administration has done everything it can to block research that relies on stem cells and fetal tissue. Trump's anti-abortion evangelical base is deeply opposed to research that relies on either of these because they have a tenuous connection to abortion.

Regeneron's embryonic stem cell line was cultured from fetal tissue from an abortion. Fetal tissue research uses material that would otherwise be discarded and is obtained with the consent of people who have abortions.

Just last month, a group of 94 anti-abortion legislators thanked Trump for "his efforts to support pro-life policies" and requested that he "end taxpayer funding for human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH)." The group's press release said there was no proof of a "single patient's life being saved through embryonic stem cell treatments."

Similarly, James Sherley, who works for the anti-abortion Charlotte Lozier Institute, said any fetal tissue research is unethical if it "even in a small part contribut[es] to motivating elective abortions."

In 2018, a workshop at the National Institutes of Health concluded that fetal tissue research was the "gold standard" for many critical studies. In response, Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List, said federal officials who promised fetal tissue research would continue were "out of step with the President's pro-life agenda" and that fetal tissue research "involve[d] harvesting the body parts of unborn children from induced abortion."

Dannenfelser and other anti-abortion activists prevailed. The administration created a Human Fetal Tissue Research Ethics Advisory Board composed mostly of people who have publicly opposed fetal tissue and embryonic stem cell research. The board voted to reject 13 of 14 applications.

This extremely restrictive view is shared by Amy Coney Barrett, Trump's nominee to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court. She's on record calling for doctors to be prosecuted for discarding unused or frozen embryos.

At the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak, an NIH researcher appealed to top officials to use fetal tissue to research potential coronavirus treatments. There's no record that he was ever allowed to do so. The researcher worked at the same laboratory, the Rocky Mountain Lab, where in 2018 the Trump administration put a halt to HIV research that would have used fetal tissue. The ban on fetal tissue research also hamstrings vital Alzheimer's and cancer research.

Even as he promises that hundreds of thousands of doses of Regeneron will be available, Trump has continued to rail against abortion, tweeting that Democrats are "fully in favor of (very) LATE TERM ABORTION, right up until the time of birth, and beyond—which would be execution." Last month, he went after Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, saying that Northam, a Democrat, "is in favor of executing babies after birth."

Democrats do not favor abortion up until the moment of birth, nor do they favor executing babies.

It seems Trump is comfortable discarding his high-profile antipathy toward stem cell and fetal tissue research when it benefits him.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.

Girl Meets German Stem Cell Donor Who Helped Her Beat Cancer

Girl Meets German Stem Cell Donor Who Helped Her Beat Cancer

By Sarah Freishtat, Chicago Tribune (TNS)

CHICAGO — Sabrina Chahir was waiting to meet the man who helped send her cancer into remission. The 8-year-old girl, who likes art and takes piano lessons, knew he had flown across an ocean to see her, nearly four years after he donated his stem cells to help rid her blood of cancer that could have taken her life.

Recently Sabrina and Maximilian Eule, 30, had their first face-to-face meeting at a celebration in suburban Schaumburg with Sabrina’s friends and family.

The two had emailed and video-chatted. But Sabrina’s mother, Natalia Wehr, said it was important to her to meet Eule in person.

“It’s your daughter, and this person we don’t know did something so wonderful,” Wehr said. “You need to know who that is.”

Sabrina was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, one of the most common types of cancer in children, when she was 2 1/2. The cancer cells were in more than 80 percent of her blood.

The girl’s cancer had gone into remission before, but she soon relapsed. After rounds of treatment and infections that caused Sabrina to go blind temporarily, doctors at Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago told Sabrina’s family she would need a stem cell transplant.

“It was the most painful thing you can imagine,” Wehr said. “Not knowing if your child is going to live or not. It’s the worst feeling in the world.”

Ten to 15 percent of children diagnosed with this type of leukemia need a stem cell transplant, but the treatment is more common for other types of cancer, said Dr. Reggie Duerst, one of Sabrina’s doctors and director of the stem cell transplant program at Lurie.

And while doctors said the best donor matches are often people of similar racial and ethnic backgrounds — Sabrina is Hispanic and Arab — her match, located through a computer database, turned out to be a German man who lives in Austria.

Wehr spent about 10 days waiting, hoping and praying before she learned Eule had agreed to become her daughter’s donor.

Eule, who paid out of pocket for his trip to America for the meeting, said he almost cried when he was told he could donate stem cells to a little girl.

He had registered as a prospective donor when a man in his village became ill, he said. Though he wasn’t a match for that man, he said he was happy he was paired with Sabrina.

“Sabrina became a part of myself,” he said.

Eule had to wait at least a year to contact Sabrina and her family, under donation rules. Then, both sides must agree to meet.

On a recent evening, in a private room of Pilot Pete’s Restaurant & Bar at the Schaumburg Airport, Sabrina waited for Eule’s arrival, wearing a fancy red party dress.

When he walked in, she jumped up, ran to him and threw her arms around him. Eule, looking a bit overwhelmed at the row of TV cameras and lights, said he “can’t find the right words” to describe what he was feeling.

The two vowed to remain in touch and exchanged gifts. Eule gave Sabrina a necklace “so you always have something from me with you.” Sabrina’s family gave her donor a watch on which they had engraved: “Time passes, memories fade, but hearts never forget.”

Moved by the other gift Eule gave Sabrina — the chance to live into adulthood — Sabrina’s cousin also registered to become a donor at a drive her family organized to help find a match for a friend.

The cousin was soon paired with a patient and donated stem cells to her twice.

“That was pretty amazing,” Wehr said. “That we were able to live this from both sides.”

Though Sabrina is in remission, the hospital plans to follow her progress throughout her life, Duerst said. It is important to re-educate young patients about what they went through, and track any complications or illnesses in her future, he said.

Sabrina doesn’t like to talk about losing her hair during treatment or look at pictures of herself from that time, Wehr said.

But she talks about wanting to be a chef when she grows up. If that doesn’t work out, maybe she’ll become a ballerina, Wehr said.

“Now’s the time to celebrate that everything went well,” she said.

(c)2015 Chicago Tribune, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC

Photo: A colony of embryonic stem cells, from the H9 cell line (NIH code: WA09). Viewed at 10X with Carl Zeiss Axiovert scope. (The cells in the background are mouse fibroblasts cells. Only the colony in the center are human embryonic stem cells). Via Wikicommons

Scientists Report Another Embryonic Cloning Success

Scientists Report Another Embryonic Cloning Success

By Monte Morin, Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES — Scientists have taken skin cells from a woman suffering from Type 1 diabetes, reprogrammed them into embryonic stem cells, and then converted those cells into insulin-producing cells in mice, according to a new study.

The announcement, which comes soon after another stem cell success involving therapeutic cloning, was published Monday in the journal Nature.

“This advance brings us a significant step closer to the development of cell replacement therapies,” said senior study author Dieter Egli, a researcher at the New York Stem Cell Foundation.

Embryonic stem cells, or pluripotent cells, are cells that can reproduce endlessly and transform themselves into any type of human tissue. Researchers hope that the cells will one day be used to create transplant tissues that will not be rejected by the patient’s body, because they carry their own DNA.

Egli and his colleagues used a cloning technique known as somatic cell nuclear transfer, or SCNT — a process similar to the one used to clone “Dolly” the sheep in 1996.

The process involves removing the nucleus from a human egg cell, replacing it with the nucleus from a foreign “donor” cell, and then allowing the egg to divide and develop for a period of days. The developing embryo will contain a mass of pluripotent cells, which are removed and used to create a line of reproducing cells.

If the cloned embryo were implanted in the womb of a surrogate mother — an act scientists consider unethical for a number of reasons — it could possibly develop into a baby.

Up until now, the stem cell field has relied on a very different method of pluripotent cell production called induced pluripotency. The process is viewed as being much easier than SCNT, because it does not involve the controversial use of human egg cells, which are also difficult to obtain.

At a news conference, Egli told reporters that the SCNT process was becoming increasingly refined and should be viewed as a reliable source of pluripotent cells.

“For me this is the way to go,” Egli said. “This is about reprogramming a patient’s own cells, with their own genotype, with their own DNA that are immunologically matched to them and no one else, essentially. I think this is going to become a reality.”

Egli and his colleagues used donor skin cells from a 32-year-old woman who has had Type 1 diabetes since she was 10 years old.

In Type 1 diabetes, a patient’s pancreas stops producing insulin. In healthy individuals, that hormone allows glucose to enter cells and be used to produce energy.

The pancreatic cells that produce insulin are called beta cells, and researchers set out to demonstrate that their pluripotent cells could become beta cells.

After harvesting pluripotent cells from the cloned embryos, they were then transplanted into mice. The mice suffered from weak immune systems, so that their bodies would not reject the human stem cells.

Study authors said the human stem cells gave rise to both nerve cells and beta cells within the mice.

While the study is encouraging, it remains unclear when similar stem cells can be implanted into humans.

Egli said the process has yet to be perfected in mice, and that he and his colleagues were now working on this. The problem, he said, was that when the beta cells were created, other cells also appeared.

“One of the main obstacles that still hold back this field is that we cannot make one and only that one cell type, without any other contaminating cells,” Egli said. “So learning how to better control that, and perhaps eliminate that, is going to be key.”

Like other researchers, Egli and his colleagues found that eggs from younger women — age 21 to 26 — were most likely to produce usable embryos.

They also found that they had more luck cloning embryos when they delayed cell division after introducing the donor nucleus.

While other researchers have used caffeine to delay cell division, a trick they have dubbed “the Starbucks effect,” Egli said he and his colleagues had better luck using histone deacetylase inhibitors, which essentially block the activity of certain enzymes.

“It is entirely possible that the caffeine has a beneficial effect, but it’s not the magic factor that makes or breaks this method,” Egli said.

Photo: UC Irvine via Flickr