Stem cell injection and tumors

[j. d. worthington]

Well, this is certainly going to add fuel to the fire:

Stem cells might cause brain tumors, study finds - Yahoo! News

I think the problem is that we're trying to apply this a bit too soon, before we really have found out enough about how the mechanisms work. While I understand the desire to find a cure (having had several relatives who suffered from Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, etc.), it can set the entire field back dramatically without proper investigation first.

Any thoughts?

[Marya]

You certainly don't want to apply it too soon. This finding will certainly (I hope) cause people to step back from anything they're doing on people.

The interesting question to me is - once they had the cells they wanted (those that produced dopamine), did this transformation into a tumor-capable cell happen in the brain (i.e. did a differentiated cell de-differentiate) or was the cell population they injected not homogeneous (i.e. all dopamine producing cells-you could have had a couple of cells still in an undifferentiated state). I would highly suspect the latter but until I read their methods, I wouldn't know. That'll be an important thing to figure out to help prevent something like this from happening.

So I agree, take it very slowly because you will get burned if you try to go too fast. Unfortunately people who are suffering from these diseases and their families want to see faster progress but I wonder how they would react if a those bad effects happened in themselves or their family member? Some of those people might be understanding of the risks but others would get very angry.

[carrie221]

I think this is a very tricky question as you have people that want to stop the research all together for moral concerns then you have this news that it may cause cancer and then you also have the people suffering from these dieases that could possible be helped...

[j. d. worthington]

Well, my own take on it (as indicated above) is that we need to continue the research -- it is an inevitable part of medicine's future, and if we don't, then we'll be left far behind as the rest of the world develops this new branch of medicine -- but we should be very, very cautious about the application of this until we know a lot more about effects. I realize that this makes it heartbreakingly close, yet terribly far for the families of those who suffer with these conditions, but nonetheless that must be weighed against the possible disastrous results of too quick administering of a new technique with unknown side-effects. Think of thalidomide, for example, which had benefits with certain mental and emotional conditions, but had horrific side effects if taken during pregnancy. We're too prone to want solutions both immediately and easily, and nothing this complex can ever have either.

[littlemissattitude]

Thalidomide is again in use, actually, having been approved by the FDA in May of this year for the treatment of multiple myeloma. However, they take huge precautions, such as not prescribing it for women of childbearing age until they have had a negative pregnancy test, mandating ongoing pregnancy tests during the time she is taking the medication, and asking that women taking the drug to either not have intercourse during that time or else using at least two methods of birth control during thalidomide's use.

[j. d. worthington]

Thanks for the info, LMA.... I'd heard somewhere that it was still being used, but the information was so vague and so long ago, I didn't know if it was accurate. So thank you for the update....

[littlemissattitude]

Well, the information I got was just a quick look-up on Wikipedia and on Web-MD or someplace like that, but I've no doubt about its accuracy. I clearly recalled hearing or reading something in the news not that long ago that thalidomide had been approved for treatment of some condition; that really made an impression, considering its history. I just couldn't remember quite what and when it was.

I agree that testing should be continue on drugs that might have some use, although obviously care has to be taken during the investigative phases, especially when using human subjects in trials.

[Briareus Delta]

With regard to stem cell research, I think that the potential benefits to humankind are so great that this news will not stop the work that is being done - however hard the moralists try.

The idea that medical science sometimes takes things too fast in the rush to find a cure (or, cynically, to make money) is quite pertinent to me at the moment. I have just signed up with a drugs research company to partake in clinical trials. I am quite nervous about it, especially since it was only recently that there was a high profile case here in the UK where one of these trials went horribly wrong. I'd like to be able to say that I'm doing it because I think that it will ultimately benefit others but the truth is......I really need the cash.

[YOSSARIAN]

This news article states that the researchers killed the animals before the cells had a chance to form tumors. Why? I'm not a scientist, but I would think if stem cell injections showed the potential to cause tumors, then the logical thing to do would be to continue observation on the animals and see if tumors actually form. Is this half-assed research, or do I misunderstand something?

[Green]

I doubt it's half-arsed, or it probably would never get published. Peer review can be quite picky, even at its slackest. There's probably (<- fine print ) a good reason for what they did.

[Marya]

For the particular paper being referred to, they were looking to answer the question - Do embryonic stem cells differentiated into dopamine producing cells reduce symptoms in a rat model of Parkinson's disease. They answered their question so in that regard the research was anything but half done.

With any scientific endeavor, experiments being done often raise new questions to be answered. They could have followed these rats out and seen what happened to those possible tumors but it would have derailed their original experiment and that particular experiment wasn't designed to answer the question of tumors (which came about in the middle of the experiment). They did the right thing in carrying through with what they were doing.

It is highly, highly likely they are going to explore the issue of tumors but this time design the experiment to look specifically at that question so that the results will have lots of meaning.

I hope I made sense.

[Green]

Sounds about right to me. I've never done any work in this field (or any field close to this one), but one thing about academia is its rigour. And tortoise-like rate of progress.

Okay, two things. Rigour and Tortoise.

Holy crap, that should be the name of a new buddy Cop drama. I'm off to pitch it to BBC1. You heard it here first.