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Discovered [Sort Of]: Personalized [Not Quite Therapeutic] Cell Stuff

The latest achievement in the stem cell research community was announced yesterday in ScienceXpress finding that iPS cells can be generated from ALS patients which then can be used to create healthy motor neuron cells. As the authors of study put it, the generation of iPS cells from these patients could allow, in the future, for personalized disease modeling, drug discovery, and therapy.

The way the report and the media articles read one would think that the holy grail for stem cell research, personalized therapies for individuals made from their own bodies' cells, is now within reach--but this is just more of the stem cell hype.

What is original about this report, as is discussed by Alice Park in Time Magazine Online is that it was previously unknown whether iPS cells could be generated from older, sick patients, like those who would have ALS or other degenerative diseases, as opposed to healthy, younger or middle aged patients as previously used in other studies. What the Harvard and Columbia researchers in this study found is that it "turned out that generating iPS cells from older patients proved no more difficult than growing them from younger ones" (Eggan, senior author, quoted in Time Magazine).

Yet, let us get caught up in the substantial media coverage given to a relatively small finding. Eggan's claim that the potential for disease modeling to understand the cause and progression of ALS may be months rather than years away seems overly optimistic, but would sound tremendously promising to a patient or a loved one suffering from the effects of ALS.

Misleading patients with ALS or any other severe disorder or injury promised to be aided by stem cell research that personalized therapies made from iPS cells from their own bodies would at this point be at the very least highly premature and most certainly any patient participating in such a research trial believing it is therapy would be laboring under the therapeutic misconception.

While one would hope that therapies would not be far away, I don't see the grounds for such unbridled optimism. Eggan's research did not test to see whether positive or negative immune reactions occur to these new motor neuron cells.

I don't think that these findings mean that personalized stem cell therapies are any closer to being around the corner today than they were yesterday. The potential barriers to clinical trials in humans still remain--using viruses or genes to reprogram adult cells than can lead to cancer--that must be replaced my other methodologies before the safe introduction of these cells or their derivatives could be allowed in humans.

Furthermore, I fervently disagree with those in the Wesley J. Smith camp who still argue that iPS cells prove the "rightness" President Bush's decision not to fund new embryonic stem cell research in the US or that the sheer fact that "less than one year after the first iPSCs were created" (Smith) proves anything about the long term viability of this line of research, it utility for "personalized" therapy or therapeutic uses of any kind, or the trajectory that ESCs would have taken with adequate research funding. Don't buy into the hype here either--this "amazing discovery" has yet to bear therapeutic fruit, too.

Keep the science going, but let's not count our cures, let alone "personalized" ones, while they are just concepts that raise patients' hopes, that falsely justify bad science policy, and that keep the media talking about benchside discoveries that are still a long way from the bedside.

Summer Johnson, PhD