Therapeutic cloning offers hope of treatment for Parkinson’s
I am repeating in almost every blog that the vast majority of personalised emails I send to scientists and academics inviting them to sign Declan’s petition to the UN on research cloning of embryos and stem cells are being dumped to spam boxes (or to cyberspace, see blog of 4 September “Obama: Yes to stem cells, funding”). The issue of spam was recently dealt with in the blog of 18 November “Our sleeping pitch is soaked”, including that on 29 February Declan emailed the Home Secretary, Jacqueline Smith; and that the NAC website was suspended on 8 March, three days after the Home Office denied there was a warrant to intercept his communications.
Anyway, yesterday I sent 246 emails to University of California San Diego (UCSD), University of Cambridge and the British Society for Cell Biology but only received five out-of-office autoreplies – 153 emails to UCSD yielded two – and, not surprisingly, only one signature. Monday was similar: 176 emails, two autoreplies – from the 99th and 100th emails – and no one signed. In fact, when I accumulate some figures from the past four weeks, we have had five signatures from the 2,553 personalised emails sent (last week it was one signature from 419 emails; two weeks ago, two signatories from 640 emails; and four weeks ago, one signature from 1,072 emails), or one signature per 510 emails – the petition to date has been signed by 585 scientists and academics, including 24 Nobel Laureates.
For two years we survived on the streets of London by selling The Big Issue, a magazine sold by homeless people on registered pitches throughout the UK. However, since the termination of our Big Issue pitches two weeks ago (see blog of 11 November “Letter of complaint to the chair of The Big Issue Foundation Charity”), we are now restricted to the 3-hour maximum computer use per day at Idea Store Whitechapel library that our local council imposed on each of our membership cards on 1 February (notwithstanding that we frequently experience difficulties with internet access and computer bookings in this library; see, for example, blog of 13 October “Letter to the Leader of Tower Hamlets Council”). It means I have had to adapt my blogs: the emphasis now is on the product of my research in the field of human embryonic stem (hES) cell research and therapeutic cloning, also known as somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), so that as soon as I have a laptop I am in a position to build within two weeks a website for our campaign in support of hES cell research and SCNT. 
The blog of 1 November “Can a cell have a soul?” includes a brief description of what this website will contain: for example, the subsection “Embryonic stem cell research” will be broken up into the associated subsections “Science”, “Law and Policy”, “Ethics” and “Applications”. For a way to develop the navigation menu I have Greenpeace International – see here; also the homepage will be loosely based on theirs. In the previous blog, I detailed the navigation menu of “Applications” for hES cell research; this same associated subsection will be simpler with respect to SCNT since a human egg shortage has greatly hampered the possibility of nuclear transfer being successful (see blog of 16 July “Therapeutic cloning: Researchers back bid to pay egg donors”).
In therapeutic cloning or SCNT, the nucleus of a somatic cell from a donor subject is inserted into an egg from which the nucleus has been removed. This cell then develops into a blastocyst from which embryonic stem cells can be harvested and differentiated for therapeutic purposes. As the genetic information in the resulting stem cells comes from the donor subject, SCNT would yield subject-specific cells that are spared by the immune system after transplantation (ScienceDaily, 24/3).
Research led by investigators at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) has shown that SCNT can be used to treat Parkinson’s disease in mice, and could have future implications as this method may be an effective way to reduce transplant rejection and enhance recovery in other diseases and in other organ systems, said Medical News Today on 25 March. The work was led by Lorenz Studer, who is Head of the Stem Cell and Tumor Biology Laboratory of the Sloan-Kettering Institute of the MSKCC (and a signatory of Declan’s petition).
I am still researching the institutes, labs, and biotechnology companies that are doing SCNT, but the San Diego biotechnology company Stemagen will feature prominently in “Applications”. Stemagen, a privately held embryonic stem cell research company, announced 17 January it has become the first in the world to create, and meticulously document, a cloned human embryo by fusing a donated egg cell with the DNA from skin cell of an adult man. “No other scientific group has documented the cloning of an adult human cell, much less been able to grow it to the blastocyst stage, the stage at which the transferred adult donor cell is driving embryonic development and the stage that yields the cells from which embryonic stem cells are made,” lead researcher Andrew French (another signatory of Declan’s petition) told Reuters Health. The company’s work is a major step toward creating embryonic stem cell lines from cloned human embryos, or cells that are specific to one person and capable of evolving into the 200 different cell types in the body, said The San Diego Union-Tribune.
But six months after the company’s success, when the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine was handing out $23 million in research grants, Stemagen’s application was denied, said Voice of San Diego. Sam Wood, the company’s chief executive, said the main reason the agency cited for the denial was the lack of a guarantee that enough eggs would be available for the research. “I'm hoping there will be a rising up of public opinion here,” he said. “If there’s not a change, this research will move to New York”, where new guidelines for a $600 million stem cell research program may allow payment for eggs. “It’s clear that without having access to resources, in this case human oocytes [eggs], we cannot move forward,” Shoukhrat Mitalipov of the University of Oregon told the Union-Tribune. Mitalipov led the only team known to have successfully conducted therapeutic cloning using monkey cells.
A chief objective of our campaign in support of SCNT is to expose that egg-payment bans are stymieing this promising avenue of research, and consequently the issue of payment for eggs will feature prominently on the website’s homepage; specifically, we will propagate the call of leading experts for a relaxation of rules restricting the compensation of egg donors to boost the supply of human eggs needed for nuclear transfer.
