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Biotech Science

FDA Approves First Brain Stem Cell Transplant 245

Posted by Zonk from the hope-it-works dept.
no reason to be here writes "An article at CNN.com is reporting on the FDA granting approval to the first ever transplant of fetal stem cells into human brains. The stem cells will be transplanted into six children suffering from Batten disease, a rare, always fatal, genetic neurological illness, which renders its victims blind and speechless before finally paralyzing them and killing them." From the article: "The stem cells to be transplanted in the brain aren't human embryonic stem cells, which are derived from days-old embryos. Instead, the cells are immature neural cells that are destined to turn into the mature cells that makeup a fully formed brain. Parkinson's disease patients and stroke victims have received transplants of fully formed brain cells before, but the malleable brain cells involved here have never before been implanted."
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FDA Approves First Brain Stem Cell Transplant More

FDA Approves First Brain Stem Cell Transplant

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  • A step forward? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ghstomahawks ( 847102 ) on Saturday October 22, 2005 @09:54PM (#13855466)
    This could be an amazing step forward for the advance of this field of science, or an amazing step backwards for it. The question isn't whether or not it'll work, it's how it will be handled by everyone involved. It won't take much to make enemies on here!
    • Luddites, Screw em

    • I do research on Batten Disease (Score:5, Informative)

      by Seoulstriker ( 748895 ) on Saturday October 22, 2005 @11:21PM (#13855839)
      It is an interesting therapeutic strategy to inject stem cells foreign to the suffering patient to alleviate the problems with the patient's own DNA. The cause of Batten Disease is a series of mutations in membrane transporters with unknown function. While the mutations affect all body tissues, it is powerfully destructive to neurons and so there is the typical accumulation of autofluorescent pigments (the so-called ceroid lipofuscinosis neuronal).

      I think the most important lesson here is that injection of stem cells and the differentiation of those cells and eventual incorporation into the functional neural network is astounding. However, the limits of the therapy are quite evident, since the patient's entire brain suffers from the accumulation of lipofuscin. You'd have to inject enough stem cells to regenerate an entire brain, which is on the scale of billions (could be off by a few factors of ten though....).

      As for the cellular and genetic basis for the accumulation of pigments, I'll have to get back to you on that when I conclude my research. :-)
      • So, if healthy stem cells aren't enough to battle the disease, perhaps gene therapy might do the trick? i.e. using some kind of virus that will mutate back the cells into normal?
      • So, any prospect of a genetic test that can be done in utero before, say, 10-12 weeks gestation? I gather you're not talking a SNP, more's the pity, but a good genetic test would be a God-send. It's hideous to abort your 3-month-old fetus, but nothing compared to watching your little boy or girl die.
        • Yes, it should be fairly easy to do a genetic test of the spectrum of ceroid lipofuscinosis related genes by simply extracting DNA from any cell and amplifying the sequence and then sequencing those genes to find the mutation.

    • Re:A step forward? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by MoogMan ( 442253 ) on Sunday October 23, 2005 @08:07AM (#13857399)
      I personally think it's a very dangerous set of things to consider. Batten Disease, being a genetic disorder can be inherited. So by helping this person, we have potentially assisted the spread of this very dangerous disease. Now, I'm not trying to sound evil but do we want to interfere with natural selection?

      Does this process *fully* cure and modify the diseased genes? What are the chances that the offspring of this child also have Batten Disease?
      • We interfere all the time. Why should this be any different?

        Anyone who's ever had a vaccination, taken an anti-biotic, hell, gotten medical attention for anything, has been futzing with natural selection.

        The life of a man in nature is nasty, brutish and short. The "natural" state for mankind, from a medical perspective, is to have shockingly high infant mortality rates, being permanently crippled by something as minor as a broken bone, and such poor nutrition, trauma medicine and susceptability to disease t
      • "So by helping this person, we have potentially assisted the spread of this very dangerous disease. Now, I'm not trying to sound evil but do we want to interfere with natural selection?"

        I love how people try to make Natural Selection something that only occurs without technology.

        WAKE UP! Technology is just as much a product of Natural Selection as anything else. Our intelligence enabled us to cure disease. This is us making progress towards eventually killing off the disease via technology.

  • Really? (Score:5, Funny)

    by connah0047 ( 850585 ) on Saturday October 22, 2005 @09:55PM (#13855475)
    which renders its victims blind and speechless before finally paralyzing them and killing them...

    Sounds like marriage.

  • Identity problem (Score:4, Insightful)

    by gringer ( 252588 ) on Saturday October 22, 2005 @09:58PM (#13855486)
    "I'm sure there is no threat to anyone's identity," said Arthur Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics. "But we are starting down that road."

    Is this guy suggesting that you could change a person's identity by injecting stem cells into their brain? It brings the idea of brainwashing to a whole new level.

    • Re:Identity problem (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      It's hard to tell with such a brief quote, but it sounds like he's talking about chimera type issues. For example, if you know individual A's brain cells will develop in a defective way, you could try replacing them (at an early stage of development) with brain cells from individual B.

      What I don't understand is why, after we've been told how important it is to use undifferentiated stem cells from embryos, these people are doing human trials with stem cells from aborted fetuses. Even if we disregard the so
    • What hes tring to say as I understood the quote was "I have no idea what could happen, this hasn't been done before." This was most likly in responce to the reporters semirandom question about the proceedure altering the patients personality.
    • ...you could change a person's identity by injecting stem cells into their brain?

      Brain cells come and go daily. Moreover, the precise location or composition of your "identity" is still posited as the hardest mystery confronting science. So, I wouldn't worry about the body-snatchers just yet...

      • Part of me wonders if the location/composition of this identity shifts throughout your whole life. And I honestly can't wait for the day when we are able to figure out what would happen if you gradually replaced one persons brain with another.

    • Re:Identity problem (Score:2, Interesting)

      by novus ordo ( 843883 )
      I had a problem with this as well. You are esentially injecting a foreign substance into a developing brain--"immature neural cells that are destined to turn into the mature cells that makeup a fully formed brain." They have a different DNA so how this affects the body's response to these cells is questionable. The immune system might think these cells are some form of a threat to the body and so it would try to kill them. On the other hand, if they develop into functioning brain cells, how will the foreign

  • Cells from miscarriages and abortions... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dria Rain ( 924729 ) on Saturday October 22, 2005 @09:59PM (#13855489)
    Though there's legitimate ethical debate on abortions, I don't think this is much different than having your organs donated after you die.
    • Though there's legitimate ethical debate on abortions, I don't think this is much different than having your organs donated after you die.

      Except, in the case of an abortion, the fetus' death is purposely induced... as opposed to dying in an accident or of natural causes.
  • "...The stem cells to be transplanted in the brain aren't human embryonic stem cells, which are derived from days-old embryos. Instead, the cells are immature neural cells that are destined to turn into the mature cells that makeup a fully formed brain."

    I have issue with this statement. The question is: -

    Is it possible to make "human matter" from non-human matter? I doubt. With this kind of reasoning, I am beginning to doubt whether we as a human race actually understand when life begins. Again, using th

  • Um, a little misleading in the intro... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Overzeetop ( 214511 ) on Saturday October 22, 2005 @10:06PM (#13855526) Journal
    Aside from ripping the first four paragraphs verbatim, it says ITFA:

    "What's more, some of the brain cells to be implanted will be derived from aborted fetuses, which Caplan also said raised ethical concerns for some."

    so the whole misdirection of not being embrionic is "technical" in nature for the right-to-life crowd.

    Anyway, it all seems academic until you read the bit at the bottom about the fellow who is going to enroll his 5 year old son, in hopes of not having to see his child die a horrible, slow death right in front of his eyes, with nothing he can do to save him. I think you have to be a parent to understand the enormity of the situation - I know for a fact that before I had a child, I wouldn't have experienced that "oh, my god" sinking feeling when reading his comments. I hope it works, and I fear that it works.

    Why do I fear that it works? Politics. If it works, there will be a "cure" for this horrible affliction. And it will likely require stem cells from pre-term fetuses, at least initially. If there's only one thing I can think of that's worse that seeing your child die slowly and painfully in front of you while you can't do anything to help, it would be having your child die slowly and painfully in front of you, knowing that there is a cure and not being able to get the cure. The fact that it would be the "religious" right that would block you from saving your own child is just and extra bone to try and swallow.

    • Re:Um, a little misleading in the intro... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Daniel Dvorkin ( 106857 ) * on Saturday October 22, 2005 @10:17PM (#13855564) Homepage Journal
      I fear the politics too, but I have to admit to a nasty little surge of glee at the thought of the "pro-life" crowd getting their hypocrisy and self-righteousness thrown back in their faces in such a dramatic manner.

      Just to make it clear where I'm coming from: I'm a parent too, and although my child is healthy and will hopefully remain so her whole life, I can tell you that if she ever does need some kind of treatment that someone objects to on religious grounds, that someone had better stay the hell out of my way.

      • Re:Um, a little misleading in the intro... (Score:5, Funny)

        by omeomi ( 675045 ) on Saturday October 22, 2005 @10:21PM (#13855588) Homepage
        if she ever does need some kind of treatment that someone objects to on religious grounds, that someone had better stay the hell out of my way.

        Amen!
      • I can tell you that if she ever does need some kind of treatment that someone objects to on religious grounds, that someone had better stay the hell out of my way.
        Indeed.

        Desire to harm anyone expressing religious opinion is much less neanderthal than doing harm in religion's name.

        • Desire to harm anyone expressing religious opinion is much less neanderthal than doing harm in religion's name.

          The desire to protect one's children from freaks predates the neanderthals by a long way.
      • Actually, in this case, they see the implication that one human life is ended to save another. The fact that a person is more attached to one human life than another human life doesn't necessarily change things.

        Many, if not most, pro-lifers believe that life begins at conception, and as such, destroying a human embryo is ending a human life.
      • If she ever needs some kind of treatment that requires you and her mother to abort a fetus you had planned to deliver to term, to obtain suitable cells to treat her, what would you do?

        This is unlikely, of course, but this kind of thing needs to be wrestled with before there is any agreement on the ethical issues that future medical research will present us with.

        We are all going to die, how far should we go to delay the inevitable?

        I just hate hypothetical questions, don't you?
        • That's a contrived example. Given the science behind what we're talking about, we're not talking about sacrificing your own fetus, but somebody else's. That little bit makes all the differences.

          Some would feign horror at the thought of "sacrificing" someone else's life to better your own, but that would be naive. We do this on a daily basis, just to maintain our comfortable life. We, the citizens of the United States could easily give up much of our standard of living to save millions of lives around the wo
      • Just to make it clear where I'm coming from: I'm a parent too, and although my child is healthy and will hopefully remain so her whole life, I can tell you that if she ever does need some kind of treatment that someone objects to on religious grounds, that someone had better stay the hell out of my way.

        Since you are so (quite reasonably) hot to trot to protect your daughter, if she was thus afflicted, would you think of ways to convince pregant women to have abortions, so that the dying fetus' stem cells co

    • The fact that it would be the "religious" right that would block you from saving your own child is just and extra bone to try and swallow.

      The one hope here is that though few parents will actually face this directly, most will be able to relate to some degree. When confronted directly with an actual demonstrated cure to a devistating fatal childhood disease vs. Fundamentalist nuts, the moderate majority will likely tell the nuts to shut up. For most people, ideology means little compared to the death of

    • In that case, Canada would be happy to welcome those who needed treatment.

      Our leaders may be as crooked and corrupt as anybody, but they're generally pretty sensible when it comes to the rights of the people.

      I guess it's because as long as we're happy they can tax the hell out of us.

      It might take a little longer to get approved here, but "moral outrage" shouldn't stop good science.
    • Well, the ultimate fear from increasingly successful transplantation therapies is hardly political. Grab Larry Niven's short story "The Jigsaw Man," if you haven't read it already, for a preview of what might happen in (say) AD 2090 when your /. karma falls to "Terrible"...

  • Bush is scheduled too (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 22, 2005 @10:09PM (#13855532)
    George is looking forward to his first human brain cells.
  • How long before we get some kind of lame-ass movie story about someone who receives donor brain cells from an unborn embryo and rapidly become EvIl InCaRnAtE?

  • Finally! (Score:5, Funny)

    by NightWulf ( 672561 ) on Saturday October 22, 2005 @10:14PM (#13855550)
    Finally a use for my sliver of Hitler's brain! These six children will be the new Boys of Brazil!

  • Brain - stem cells (Score:4, Interesting)

    by saskboy ( 600063 ) on Saturday October 22, 2005 @10:15PM (#13855555) Homepage Journal
    The title is a bit ambiguous isn't it? Brain stem, or stem cells, or brain stem stem cells?

    But I thought that the thing that made stem cells special was that they could be encouraged to grow into any other type of human cell? Or are there special stem cells just for brains, brain stems, or spinal nerves?

  • wow. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by CDPatten ( 907182 )
    sometimes you have to just stop and think about the magnitude of scale something like this is. Just incredible. We are very fortunate to live in this time, I can't wait to see what happens this century, hopefully we can avoid blowing ourselfs up before we start discovering the really cool stuff...
    • calm yourself down. i'd like to point out these following things that do not yet exist: cure for cancer, flying car, free renewable energy, holodeck, ability to regrow new organs, computer implants for our brains, etc.

      remeber reading in wired about all these things that we were gonna get "soon"? yeah...it's not going to happen.

  • Yikes, this is kind of scary (Score:5, Interesting)

    by zappepcs ( 820751 ) on Saturday October 22, 2005 @10:51PM (#13855723) Journal
    All the good comments aside, could this end up like a cure for the terminally stupid?

    If its possible to cure brain diseases with this process(s), couldn't you also fix things like bad memory? or turn people in to 'lawn mower men' kind of people? What happens when you augment the wetware of 'normal' people? Would they stop smoking? Could you break peoples ingrained habits with a wetware upgrade?

    The implications are way more than anyone has mentioned yet...

    If you look at human minds/brains as a wetware machine, then some very odd thinking patterns have been (more or less) shown to be wetware problems (epilepsy etc.) and if that is so, can we cure all kinds of psychosis with a wetware upgrade? How does that affect our views of god, humanity, and disease? What if we can make people smarter than Einstein? Science fiction stories have had fields days with this kind of stuff.

    If we can augment or repair natural decay, could we also tinker with the endocrine system in general? Perhaps diabetes is just a failed ROM chip initially? Would Thyroidism just be a Flash chip change?

    This is indeed exciting, but also very scary. We have had stories about countries not getting enough vaccines for aids and now H5N1 etc. What kind of abuses can this lead to, and how do we set out rules for how this sort of thing should be dealt with?

    All we need is one Dr Moreaux (sp) to mess up and everything could get very whacked out indeed.

    I'm rather perplexed at the implications.
    • If you look at human minds/brains as a wetware machine, then some very odd thinking patterns have been (more or less) shown to be wetware problems (epilepsy etc.) and if that is so, can we cure all kinds of psychosis with a wetware upgrade? How does that affect our views of god, humanity, and disease? What if we can make people smarter than Einstein?

      All of those are interesting questions, that require complicated answers... to sum up: "it depends."

      More specifically, when you say "can we cure all kinds o

  • The religious / pro life argument is insensible (Score:5, Insightful)

    by whogben ( 919335 ) on Saturday October 22, 2005 @10:57PM (#13855754)
    Sure, even if you believe a fetus is a human being - if it comes to one life for another, the potential to be a human shouldn't surpass an actual, living human in need of help! The counterclaim has sometimes been: We aren't gods! Giving life to Jimmy at the expense of the fetus is arrogance in the face of God! Wait a moment - when has it not been ok to choose one life over another? Where was the religious right during the cold war? Or the Iraq war? Or capital punishment? Surprise - life vs life decisions are made all the time, for a variety of reasons, convenience among others - by those same people who will tell you that they can't choose in the case of "fetus 4971 Vrs Jimmy"
    • Where was the religious right during the cold war? Or the Iraq war? Or capital punishment?

      Many stood firmly against all that as well. I am against abortion rights, against the death penalty, and against any war that doesn't have at it's core a STRONGLY morally-justifiable end (as it did in the classic example of WWII and the more recent Rawandan Genocide affair).

      Don't assume that just becuase someone disagrees with you that they are somehow inconsistent.

  • im very glad, (Score:2, Interesting)

    by shrewd ( 830067 )
    advancements in these life-saving feilds always seems to get stunted by idiotic activists and religious people, somehow saving lives offends god and we should stop it.

    don't mod this funny, because it's not.
    • there are potential problems with such technology that might give even an atheist pause: how about a government or corporations creating a situation whereby people are coerced or misled into terminating pregnancy for the sole purpose of harvesting? Already abortion clinics agressively steer patients away from at-home medicinal abortions in favor of surgical procedure; I'm already wondering about the affect on profit margin for these clinics= were patients able to expressly forbid any material that comes

  • No matter... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by wingsofchai ( 817999 ) on Saturday October 22, 2005 @11:26PM (#13855862)
    Whether you agree with this or not this should strike you as an enormous event likely of the millennium should this be successful. This single event may open the doors to ethical debates we've only seen the tips of, and in the end it may not just stop at words, but violence. One side would argue that violence is already occurring just to do it at all.

  • Rights (Score:3, Interesting)

    by hhawk ( 26580 ) on Saturday October 22, 2005 @11:38PM (#13855901) Homepage Journal
    #0 This is a major advance that we are at the point of being able to do this type of experiment; the more we learn about our bodies the better our lives will be.

    #1 I think the rights of the living out weight the rights of the unborn.

    #2 Let's be honest, EVERY medical advance for the last 500 or 1000 years was SEEN AS moral "issue" for those deeply religous including most Christians. I think they are all ethnically bankrupt for accepting ANY modern medical treatment. True Christians should take the point of view of the Christian Scientist movement and leave ANY healing in GODS hands; to do anything LESS than that, is not to accept both GOD and Jesus.

  • The real question is... (Score:3, Funny)

    by slashname3 ( 739398 ) on Saturday October 22, 2005 @11:46PM (#13855933)
    Can we volunteer upper management for a brain cell injection? I think there are plenty of people in the office willing to chip in to cover the costs. Even if this does not fix them it would keep them from making stupid decisions for a short period of time while they are in the hospital.

    ;)
  • Is this going to cut down on the number of duplicate stories on Slashdot?

  • From the other side (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 23, 2005 @12:27AM (#13856122)
    I'm probably going to get flamed straight to Hell by the hardcore left fanatics but I'm still posting. Unpopular opinion is still protected by the first amendment.

    When I read this my stomach essentially sank. Anyone who thinks this is absolute right vs absolute wrong doesn't know what they're talking about.

    What the moral issue here is, is that it's essentially harvesting of human life. A human fetus is essentially a human child that has developed to the point of posessing organs, human shape and a brain. Essentially a viable human life at this point. In fact this leads to partial birth abortion in a way.

    You see partial birth abortion is essentially using a probe to kill a human fetus in the womb then extracting it. This is done with fetuses that are viable human lives once removed, thus must be killed before removal or it is considered a living human child.

    In short this is the equivilent of killing a newborn baby with the only difference being location. That however isn't the subject of this post and I'll move on.

    The article wasn't entirely clear but I'm suposing this is more likely early term fetuses not yet viable as living once removed, however it's dangerously close.

    It is a good thing that there's a method of saving human lives, and yes it's natural for one to place one's self in the situationo f the parents of these children. However that's the case of parental instinct to choose one's own offspring over another.

    Would you honestly hesitate to kill someone else's child to save your own? This is essentially the case. Any attempts to justify things into black and white are nothing more than attempts to convince one's self. Lions will sometimes kill the offspring of other lions in order to mate with the mothers and produce their own young. It's the same underlying primal instinct behind the very heated statements before this post.

    If placed in the same situation I would probably make the natural descision to save my own young at the expense of another. However I'm not going to put myself in that position and rather should make a logical choice as a third party. As a third party without emotional attachment, and assuming we are dealing with a viable human life on the other side the two sides stand roughly equal.

    In this case the side with a parent willing to take another life in order to save their child's life, against the child with a parent looking rather to avoid becoming a parent (and obviously not considering the option of adoption, which puts infertile couples on multi year waiting lists and continues to fund america's abortion industry), yes the parent willing to take one life to save their child's when met with no oposition will succeed every time.

    Much in the way herd animals will allow their young to be chased down and killed by predators in order to save themselves, as a breeding age, healthy animal has a better chance of reproducing than a still vulnerable calf that is until it's an adult, still expendable.

    But let's look at the human side of this now. Let's forget baser animal instincts and use that intellect that sets us apart from predators and prey. If you put a logical argument of life vs life, you can't so easilly come with a right answer. You have your animal instinct that gives you a gut answer, or you have the religious right with an imposed super-ego which gives them an automatic gut answer in the oposite direction.

    If we were going strictly by Darwinism, it would be better to allow the healthy unborn child to live, while allowing the child with a genetic defficiency to die. However don't confuse me as stating that that is the morally right answer.

    In terms of human morality, which exists somewhere undefinable between our base insticts, our concious intellect, and our ingrained super-ego, there isn't a clear right answer.

    Human morality dictates that human life be valued equally. An individual with a genetic defficiency has as much right to live as a healthy individual. Even
  • If this works, maybe they'll eventually get round to doing the same for disabled adults with progressive forms of multiple sclerosis, like myself. I'd appreciate if they hurry up - typing this with two fingers on my left hand kinda shows that I'm already moderately far gone :-/

    Fingers (on my now-useless right hand) crossed for the kids involved. At least my illness won't kill me real soon.
  • This will be a long story, I am kinda dumping my feelings and my memory here. It is the only way I know how to express myself when it comes to this subject.

    In the late 1960's my father developed kidney disease - his kidneys stopped functioning and basically turned to stone. As unfortunate as this was for him, it really was a good time to get the disease. There was a great deal of research being done in the field and "kidney machines" were far enough advanced so that he was able to lead a somewhat comfort

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