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FEAT DAILY ONLINE NEWSLETTER Families for Early Autism Treatment

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" Healing Autism: No Finer a Cause on the Planet "

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DC Rally for Autism / New Movie Dyslexic / More Stem Research, Debate

Saturday, October 09, 1999

Rally, Press Conference and Hearing on Tuesday, October 12 2:30pm

The location for the rally/press conference is the House Triangle, east

side of the capitol (opposite side from the Washington monument, on the left

as you face the capitol). The podium, mikes, etc. will start to set up at

2:00, and they'll have a banner, so just look for the group. Try to arrive

at 2:15pm.

In case of rain (no hurricanes, thank you), they'll be in 2218 Rayburn

HOB.

Says CAN organizer Emkin, " it is critical we have a large

turnout. PLEASE bring your kids, signs, and loud voices. This is our

chance to be heard. "

* * *

New Movie Portrays Young Dyslexic

Anya's Bell is a touching new television movie about a unique

friendship

between a blind woman and a dyslexic 12 year old boy who each take it upon

themselves to teach and encourage the other to overcome their

disabilities. Della Reese plays the title role. The movie airs on the CBS

network on Sunday, October 31 (9:00 - 11:00 P.M., ET/PT).

* * *

Stem Cell Discovery Grows Into A Debate

New Field Faces Tests On the Hill, in the Lab

[by Rick Weiss Washington Post Staff Writer, Saturday, October 9,

1999.]

It has been a year since researchers announced they had discovered in

human embryos and fetuses a unique type of cell with the potential to treat

a host of ailments, including diabetes, Parkinson's disease and even

paralysis caused by spinal cord injury.

Now, in the final weeks of bargaining over a new federal budget, a

divided Congress is struggling to decide whether the medical promise of

these " human embryonic stem cells " is great enough to justify the use of

taxpayer money to study them, despite the fact that embryos and fetuses must

be destroyed to get them.

Congress has blocked federal funding of human embryo research for the

past four years, but the discovery of stem cells has upped the ante in the

embryo research debate. The research ban, which is attached to the

appropriations bill for the departments of Labor and Health and Human

Services, underwent several radical changes while the Senate addressed the

bill last week, at various times containing prohibitions far stronger or

weaker than in previous years. On Monday, the House will begin action on the

issue.

For many lawmakers, it is largely a question of whom they least wish to

alienate: highly motivated and perhaps overly optimistic members of patient

groups who believe that stem cells may soon save their lives or the lives of

their loved ones, or equally passionate antiabortion activists who believe

it is unethical to experiment on embryonic and fetal tissues.

But for the many publicly funded scientists who want to investigate the

cells, the issue is a no-brainer: The nation ought to enlist their help,

they say, because it is becoming increasingly clear that it will not be easy

to turn stem cells into cures.

Among the more frustrating problems is how to get the cells to grow

into the specific kinds of cells needed by patients, such as heart cells to

be given to a heart attack victim or pancreas cells to be given to a

diabetic. Today the cells behave as though they have a mind of their own,

becoming whatever kind of cell they choose, and for no apparent reason.

" You smile at them and they become heart, you frown and they become

brain, " complained Tom Okarma, president and chief executive officer of

Geron Corp. of Menlo Park, Calif., which has funded most of the human

embryonic stem-cell work in this country. The challenges ahead, he said,

" are formidable. "

Indeed, while Okarma and others still hold high hopes that stem cells

will lead to medical breakthroughs, ongoing studies by privately funded

scientists at Geron and elsewhere have lent an air of sobriety to a field

that a year ago seemed almost drunk with promise.

For example, it is still difficult to keep stem cells alive in the

laboratory, and it has been impossible to grow them in numbers large enough

to be medically useful. Moreover, scientists still don't know how to

engineer the cells so they won't be rejected by patients.

" The only way we're going to figure all this out is to roll up our

sleeves and do the nitty-gritty research, " said Harvard University cell

biologist Evan Snyder. " There's such a clamor in the stem-cell field, but we

should not let the clamor or the substantial promise seduce us into thinking

we can do this quickly. "

Embryonic stem cells are the basic, " plain vanilla " cells present at

the core of newly developing animals. During prenatal development, they

differentiate into more specialized cells, such as those that form the skin,

liver, kidneys and brain.

What makes them unique is their ability to multiply indefinitely in

laboratory dishes, where they can give rise to offspring cells that also

have the ability either to blandly reproduce or, under the right influence,

specialize into any of the body's tissue types. Doctors hope they will be

able to grow a smorgasbord of replacement tissues from stem cells, for

transplantation into people who need them.

After years of funding from Geron, two research teams announced

simultaneously last fall that they had finally isolated human embryonic stem

cells. One team retrieved them from young human embryos and the other from

the immature sex organs of aborted fetuses.

The best news so far is that the cells seem to be as immortal as

advertised, said Thomson, the University of Wisconsin researcher who

isolated human stem cells from leftover fertility clinic embryos. After

almost two years of living and dividing in laboratory dishes, every new

generation of cells seems just as young and full of potential as the

previous one.

To prove that, Thomson has injected into mice freshly grown human stem

cells that are more than 300 generations removed from the parent cells he

isolated from his original human embryo. Stem cells that have retained their

full potential should, when they are injected into mice, differentiate into

all the many kinds of tissues that they can become. And these

300th-generation cells have done so with exquisite creativity, Thomson said,

with some of them becoming hair, others teeth, and still others little

masses of cardiac cells that soon begin to beat in unison like a miniature

heart.

In fact, it is not difficult to get stem cells to differentiate into

various tissues. The hard part is growing them into the specific kind of

tissue you want -- and keeping them from specializing until you are ready.

Scientists will have to grow huge vats of stem cells in their

undifferentiated state if they are ever to commercialize them. Currently,

however, the only way to keep the cells in this " primordial " state is to

grow them in small dishes along with a special type of mouse cell.

The mouse cells -- known as " feeder cells " -- somehow keep human stem

cells from spontaneously following their urge to specialize. But despite

valiant efforts, Thomson and others have failed to identify how the feeder

cells do that. It is a bottleneck scientists will need to get through if the

research is ever going to become useful for patients, because the mouse-cell

system is too cumbersome to scale up to commercial levels.

It's not an impossible task. Several years ago, researchers working

with mouse embryonic stem cells were in the same bind: Those cells only

retained their full potential when grown with finicky feeder cells. Then

researchers found that a compound secreted by the feeder cells, called

leukocyte inhibitory factor, or LIF, was the magic substance that was

keeping the stem cells vital. Since then, scientists have just had to add

some LIF to their dishes of stem cells, eliminating the need for feeder

cells.

" After that, the mouse studies took off, " recalled Pederson, a

Geron-supported researcher of human stem cells at the University of

California at San Francisco. Unfortunately, LIF does not do for human stem

cells what it does for mouse stem cells, Pederson said. " Someone has to

discover the LIF counterpart for human stem cells. "

Perhaps even more daunting is the task of learning how to prod batches

of stem cells to mature into specific kinds of cells for transplantation

into people, such as liver cells for patients with cirrhosis or specific

kinds of brain cells for patients with Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease.

Scientists have had some small successes in encouraging stem cells to

turn into desired types, such as blood cells and nerve cells.

Last December, for example, s Hopkins University researcher

Gearhart stood before a Senate subcommittee and unveiled a poster-size

photograph of spidery living cells with branched, outreaching arms. These

appear to be healthy human brain cells, said Gearhart, grown in a laboratory

dish from a starter batch of stem cells by feeding them a special recipe of

nutrients. He plans to inject some into the brains of rodents this fall, to

start assessing their potential as a treatment for brain diseases.

But Gearhart's method is far from foolproof. Many stem cells treated

with the same nutrients do not become neurons, and retain the potential to

become bone, muscle or other cells later on -- cells that would not be

welcome in a patient's brain.

Even less is known about how to spur stem cells to grow with

assuredness into other kinds of cells, such as the insulin-secreting

pancreas cells that, given the prevalence of diabetes in this country, are

foreseen by Geron as the first " blockbuster " moneymakers. Somehow,

researchers will have to overcome stem cells' apparently fickle nature.

Finally, there is the problem of immune-system rejection. Researchers

want to figure out which molecules on stem cells are recognized as foreign

by a patient's immune system. In theory, researchers could genetically

engineer the cells to lack those molecules -- a simple-sounding strategy

that scientists concede will probably take many years to implement.

Depending on who is talking, problems such as these add up to an

argument either for, or against, a quick infusion of federal funds.

[For entire article, go to web link below, all on one line:]

http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-10/09/085l-100999-idx.ht

ml

© Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company

____________________________________________________________

editor: Lenny Schafer east coast editor: , Ph.D.

schafer@... CIJOHN@...

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