this is NOT looking good man...

No stem-cell triumph: Embryos were destroyed

By McClatchy News Open
Last Update: 8/31/2006 3:47:59 AM
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Aug 31, 2006 (The Philadelphia Inquirer - McClatchy-Tribune Business News via COMTEX) -- The California biotech company that grabbed headlines last week for sparing human embryos while creating precious stem cells in fact destroyed all 16 embryos used in the experiments.

Advanced Cell Technology vice president Robert Lanza, senior author of the research, was widely quoted as saying he hoped the new embryo-sparing approach to making stem cells would overcome ethical objections and expand federal funding for the research.

Supplemental data submitted with the paper revealed that Lanza's team did not fully use the approach -- it just extrapolated from less ambitious experiments.

But the lay media weren't the only ones who misunderstood. Nature, the prestigious international journal that published the paper, initially issued a news release that declared Lanza's team had made embryonic stem-cell colonies "while leaving the embryo intact." The journal has since issued two "clarifications" and published online the supplemental data showing the embryos were destroyed.

"We feel it necessary to explain that... the embryos that were used for these experiments did not remain intact," Ruth Francis, Nature's senior press officer, e-mailed the media.

Asked why Nature editors did not make that clear in the paper, Francis e-mailed The Inquirer: "We are looking into the possibility of further clarification of this paper."

In an interview with The Inquirer last week, Lanza explicitly said some of the embryos survived and were returned to frozen storage.

Yesterday, he said he was referring to embryos used in experiments that were complementary to, but separate from, the Nature paper.

Some commentators said such dissembling only added to fears -- raised by last year's South Korean stem-cell research fraud that marred the reputation of the journal Science -- that the field is hyped and suspect.

A call for funding

"It's deeply disturbing," said David Magnus, director of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics. "But I think it speaks to why we need state and federal funding of this research. Otherwise, we're dependent on small, underfunded companies like Advanced Cell Technology to do the work. They have a history of making somewhat spurious announcements when they're in need of cash."

Normally, embryonic stem cells are extracted when they briefly appear in a five-day-old embryo, which has about 100 cells. This kills the embryo.

Lanza's team intervened earlier, dismantling eight- to 10-cell embryos, then signaling the individual cells to transform into stem cells. This transformation was a breakthrough, but it was highly inefficient: Of 91 individual cells, only two ultimately made new stem-cell colonies.

Here is where the paper turned speculative: The 16 dismantled embryos might have survived if only one or two of their eight cells had been removed.

The 'breakthrough here'

Indeed, infertility clinics occasionally perform "embryo biopsy" on an eight-cell embryo to screen for genetic diseases before letting the embryo grow to about 100 cells, the size normally implanted in a womb.

The Nature paper showed a picture of a 100-cell embryo that Lanza's lab had biopsied at the eight-cell stage -- implying that it was part of the stem-cell experiments rather than separate, related research.

Lanza's team wrote that the paper shows that single cells "can be used to establish human embryonic stem-cell lines using an approach that does not interfere with the developmental capacity of the parent embryo."

Yesterday, Lanza said he saw no reason to explain that they had not actually used that approach on the embryos from which stem cells were generated.

"The scientific breakthrough here is that a single cell has the capacity to make embryonic stem cells," he said. "It was not the purpose of this study to repeat what we already know" -- that an early embryo can be biopsied without killing it.

In 2001, Advanced Cell Technology was lionized, and then criticized, when its published assertion of having cloned the first human embryos turned out to be exaggerated. Of 19 embryos, only one reached the six-cell stage, then died.

The company was on the brink of insolvency in 2004 after South Korean scientist Hwang Woo-suk published evidence -- since shown to be a sham -- that his lab had achieved the human embryo-cloning milestone.

Last week, Advanced Cell's shriveled stock value more than quadrupled after the Nature paper was published online, and the company's chief executive officer was quoted saying that he hoped the ability to make stem cells without destroying embryos would attract new investors.

Lanza said yesterday that he did not know how the latest news would affect the company. The firm's shares fell more than 9 percent yesterday to 78 cents a share. "To be truthful, I'm so deeply involved in the scientific side," Lanza said, "you'd have to talk to the business end."