It has finally happened – the technique used in 1996 to make Dolly, the world’s first cloned mammal, has finally been used in 2013 to make the world’s first cloned human embryo. Despite a history in the years after Dolly of nuts, crackpots, frauds and charlatans announcing that they had either cloned embryos or cloned babies--who can forget the Raelians with their star fleet uniforms announcing the creation of multiple clone baby births to a credulous press core—we have an announcement that is the real deal. A team of experts in cloning at Oregon Health Sciences University who have extensive experience and success with primate cloning have announced the cloning of human embryos.

This announcement is sure to set off a heated debate about the morality of what they have done and what could be done with cloned human embryos. But while there is some reason for concern, there is more reason for excitement.

The Oregon team has been trying to clone human embryos for many years. Why? Not to produce cloned people but to have a source of stem cells useful for the treatment of diseases.

Those who oppose manipulating embryos to generate stem cells -- and their number is huge -- will be blasting away at what has been achieved.

But before they try to freak you out with terrifying images of clone armies directed by despots (think “Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones”), the unmourned dead coming back to life via cloning (think Osama bin Laden) or the creation of multiple copies of particularly odd or dangerous people (think of dozens of versions of Lindsay Lohan or Charlie Sheen in your neighborhood), remember that the whole point of cloning research is to come up with stem cells that have the same genetic makeup as the person who needs them.

Stem cells can be obtained from human embryos at fertility clinics. But the cells that are made from them will not match those to whom they might be transplanted to repair macular degeneration, spinal cord injury or diabetes. Through cloning you can take a disabled or sick person's DNA from one of their body cells, insert it into a human egg from which the DNA has been removed, fuse the cell electrically (the technique used in Oregon) and create an embryo from which cells can be grown that are identical matches to what the sick or disabled person needs.

There are certainly crucially important ethical issues that cloning raises.  Should anyone be allowed to try to make people using cloning? Most assuredly not until cloning efforts with animals prove far safer then they currently are. Many animals made via cloning die in utero, are stillborn or have a variety of serious health issues as did Dolly, the first cloned sheep. For now, banning human reproductive cloning—not cloning for stem cell research, as many nations have already done -- ought to be a legislative priority in the U.S. and around the world.

If we are going to need eggs to clone human embryos, then where are they coming from? Most likely in the short run from donors who will have to fully understand what their eggs will be used to create. Whether paid sellers of eggs will be needed in the future remains to be seen, but that is not yet likely to be a problem.

And some will say we don’t need to make cloned embryos to get stem cells because there are other ways to get them. There are other ways but this may prove to be the best way medically to get the regenerative cells that so many could benefit from.

Cloning a human embryo to create stem cells has been a dream for many scientists since Dolly was born. Cloning a human embryo has been a source of ethical nightmares for many theologians, ethicists and scientists since Dolly was born. It has now time to decide if we can manage a technology that holds great promise while assuring those who fear its abuse that their concerns will be fully addressed.

Arthur Caplan, Ph.D., is the head of the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU Langone Medical Center.

Related stories:

Cloning technique produces human stem cells for first time

Ethicist: Fixing genes using cloning technique is worth ethical risk

Oregon Health&Science University

Donor egg held by pipette prior to nuclear extraction.

Researchers say they have finally managed to use cloning technology to make human embryos and grow stem cells from them in the hopes of making perfectly matched grow-your-own tissue transplants.

They used a human egg cell and parts of a human skin cell to grow a very early human embryo, then transformed cells from this ball of cells into beating heart cells and skin cells. The process may eventually help treat a range of diseases, from Parkinson’s to rare inherited conditions, they reported Wednesday in the journal Cell.

The researchers, at Oregon Health & Science University, say their embryos almost certainly could not grow into living human babies or even start a pregnancy – they’re deficient in a key way. But they admit also that they haven’t quite overcome ethical qualms about working with human embryos.

However, the work opens another route to treatments using human embryonic stem cells, the body’s master cells. “These stem cells are kind of very early unprogrammed cells but they have the capacity to become any other cell type,” says Shoukhrat Mitalipov, who led the research.

These cells are very different from so-called adult stem cells, like those taken from bone marrow. Adult stem cells cannot give rise to cells of other tissue types -- blood cells cannot be used to make brain cells, for instance.

Dr. George Daley, a stem cell expert at Harvard Medical School, called it a "beautiful piece of work".

When human embryonic stem cells were first discovered in 1998, scientists immediately dreamed of using cloning technology to help people grow their own organ and tissue transplants, and to use them to study disease. They’d be perfect genetic matches for each patient, meaning an end to a lifetime of taking dangerous immune-suppressing drugs after an organ transplant.

But in the many years since, no lab’s been able to do the work easily. It seems it is much harder to clone a human being than it is to clone a sheep, a frog or a mouse. And then there are the ethical concerns, not only concerns about cloning human beings but over working with human embryos. A federal court has only just ruled in the past year that government funds may be used in the research.

Scientists have found several other routes to harnessing the power of these master cells, which can give rise to any tissue type in the body, from nerve cells to muscle, bone and skin. There are cells taken from embryos left over at fertility clinics – currently being tested as treatments for blindness by a company, Advanced Cell Technology of Massachusetts.

Oregon Health & Science University

Researchers at Oregon Health & Science University have successfully developed a method for converting human skin cells into embryonic stem cells.

Other groups have learned how to “trick” ordinary skin cells into re-modeling themselves into different tissues. These so-called induced pluripotent stem cells, iPS cells for short, might also some day be used to grow transplants perfectly matched to a patient. But again, the technique isn’t easy and there have been many stumbling blocks.

Several other scientists said the science was sound, but said the field had mostly moved on from the pursuit of cloning technology. "IPS cells are easier to produce and have wide applications in research and regenerative medicine, and it remains to be shown whether (cloned embryonic stem cells) have advantages over iPS cells," Daley said by e-mail.

Cloning almost got left in the dust with the work on the other techniques. But the team at OHSU had been perfecting the technique in monkeys, and now they’ve managed to make it work with human cells. The advantage, they say, is that the donated human egg provides fresh and rejuvenating DNA.

The technique they use is called somatic cell nuclear transfer – the same method used to make Dolly, the sheep who was the first mammal cloned from the cell of another adult mammal, in 1996. Scientists remove the nucleus from a normal cell, usually a type of skin cell. They do the same with a human egg cell, then inject the nucleus from the skin cell into the egg.

Various chemical or electrical tricks can be used to start the egg growing as if it had been fertilized by sperm. The method’s been used to make sheep, dogs, horses, and mice – but never human beings.

None of these clones are precise copies because the egg contains an important source of DNA, called mitochondrial DNA. And defects in this DNA cause many diseases, including diabetes and a condition called Leigh syndrome, which causes seizures and dementia.

Mitalipov hopes that replacing the mitochondrial DNA as part of the cloning process might help make tissue that could correct these diseases. His team tested cells taken from a patient with Leigh syndrome, a neurological disorder, and made stem cells using the technique.

“It allows you to produce genetically corrected cells,” he said. “There are a variety of age-related diseases that we believe are caused by acquired mitochondrial mutations.”

Lots of testing lies ahead and because of laws banning the use of federal money to directly make human embryos, Mitalipov’s lab uses private funds instead. But he believes the method cannot be used to make human babies.

“We have been doing it for years in primates and the embryos never implant,” he said. The blastocysts appear to lack a key layer of cells, he said, that give rise to the placenta and that are needed for a normal pregnancy.

Nonetheless, he admits that is unlikely to reassure people who object to experimenting on human embryos. “They’ll say ‘oh, you are just creating a disabled embryo’,” he said.

O. Carter Snead, a bioethicist and professor of law at the University of Notre Dame, called it sad news. “The use and destruction of living human beings – at any stage of biological development – for scientific research is a terrible injustice.  Human cloning for biomedical research is a particularly aggravated form of this harm," Snead said in a statement.

Another barrier --- human eggs are not easy to come by and there are also ethical questions about whether women should be paid to donate their eggs for this kind of research.

The work will almost certainly be used to study diseases in lab dishes at first. But Daley, who heads the bone marrow transplant program at Boston Children's Hospital, said using a patient's own cells offers potentially huge advantages. "A lot of patients don't have an optimal donor," he said. So bone marrow transplants are done only for the patients in the most dire need.

"If we could make every patient their own donor ... we would bypass the transplant barrier," he said. "Everyone could be a donor for themselves."

Related:

• Ethicist: Cloning offers more cause for excitement, not concern
• Supreme Court lets embryonic stem cell research go forward
• Court rules on controversial human research
• Stephen Hawking visits stem cell lab

University of Rochester Medical Center

Human brain cells in a mouse glow green because researchers have tagged them with a gene that looks green under fluorescent light. Mice with the human cell transplants were smarter than normal mice, the researchers report.

Researchers who transplanted human brain cells into newborn mice said the rodents grew up to be smarter than their normal littermates, learning how to associate a tone with an electric shock more quickly and finding escape hatches faster.

The experiments are aimed at making models to study human brain diseases such as Huntington’s and schizophrenia, as well as nerve diseases such as multiple sclerosis. But the team at the University of Rochester say their findings also suggest that these brain cells, called glial cells, may very well be one of the important factors that make humans different from other animals.

“Human cognitive evolution might be the product of glial evolution,” said Dr. Steven Goldman, who worked with his partner and wife Dr. Maiken Nedergaard on the study. Their findings also support the growing theory that glia cells, one of the important components of the brain’s so-called white matter, are far from being passive support cells and are in fact actively involved in brain function.

Down the road, Goldman hopes the findings might lead to procedures to transplant brain cells to treat diseases as diverse as multiple sclerosis, bipolar disease and even the brain shrinkage that causes memory loss in aging.

“There are a number of diseases that are specific to humans -- neuropsychiatric diseases, schizophrenia, bipolar disease. Animals don’t get these,” Goldman said in a telephone interview. Apes might – it’s not clear. “One of the possibilities is that neuropsychiatric disorders may have evolved with glial evolution.”

Writing in the journal Cell Stem Cell, Nedergaard and Goldman said they were trying to find ways to cure mice of multiple sclerosis, which is caused when nerve cells lose their fatty coating of myelin and stop working properly. They used immature cells called glial progenitor cells taken from aborted fetuses, infused them into the brains of newborn mice, and watched what happened.

Progenitor cells are partly along the path to from undefined to “adult” cells, and seem to have a better ability to flourish when transplanted. The human glial cells not only survived in the brains of the mice – they thrived, Goldman says.

"The human glia cells essentially took over to the point where virtually all of the glial progenitor cells and a large proportion of the astrocytes in the mice were of human origin, and essentially developed and behaved as they would have in a person's brain," said Goldman.

Human glia are far more complex than mouse glia, and they help form many, many more connections, called synapses, between neurons. The more synapses, the faster and better the brain works. Tests in lab dishes showed the mouse brains with human cells transmitted signals much more quickly than normal mouse brains.

“So here we have these brains where most of the glia are human. And we know that human glia are different from those of most of other species,” Goldman says. “Have their cognitive abilities been enhanced?”

They put the animals to the test -- first a simple one called a conditioned fear response. “You expose the animals to a tone and a very mild shock,” Goldman said. “Mice don’t like to get shocked and they learn to associate the tone with the shock. Mice, when they are afraid, they freeze.” The mice with the human glia froze faster and stayed frozen longer than thieir littermates without human glia, Goldman and Nedergaard found.

“It is a really dramatic effect,” Goldman said. Some learned after just one shock to fear the tone.

Another test involved learning to find and use an escape hatch. Again, the mice with human glial cells learned faster.

To make sure it wasn’t just the transplant of fresh cells that was improving learning, the researchers transplanted mouse progenitor glial cells into newborn mice. These animals did not learn any faster.

Goldman isn’t worried that he is somehow making mice with human brains. “We are not humanizing the mice,” he says. “We were affecting the brain activity with human glial cells ... These are still mouse brains, bottom line.” Transplanting neurons might be a different matter, he said.

There are many animals that carry human cells -- from the millions of lab mice injected with human tumor cells to study cancer, to sheep engineered to produce human liver cells. But the experiment raises a red flg, says bioethicist Arthur Caplan of New York University medical center.

"This experiment is the ethical equivalent of Superstorm Sandy," Caplan says. "It brings together a controversial source of stem cells -- obtained from aborted fetuses to create human-animal chimeras which frighten many members of the public and Congress.  The utility of the work for understanding diseases and the development of therapies for them is enormous but it is vitally important that an agreed upon, transparent and enforced set of rules and review processes be instituted to govern further research using stem cells from humans in animal brains or vice versa."

These new mice might be used to study ways to treat a range of human diseases. The technique of transplanting progenitor cells into newborns might hold special promise in treating genetic diseases such as Niemann-Pick or Tay-Sachs disease, Goldman says.

These diseases both are marked by abnormal brain cells, including glia. “It is possible that by introducing normal glial cells in these kids we may well be able to treat these disorders with cell transplants,” he said.  

The technique is most definitely not a way to make people smarter, he said. But it could restore some of the normal damage caused in aging. Some cases of vascular dementia are in fact not caused by little strokes in the brain, but are age-related white matter loss, Goldman asserts. “As we get older we lose more and more white matter,” he said.

It’s possible glial cell transplants could help. But transplants of brain cells into adult mice don’t work as well. The cells take up residence but they don’t multiply and take over the way they do in the newborns, whose brains are still developing, Goldman said.

Last month, Goldman and Nedergaard reported they made human glial progenitor cells out of ordinary human skin cells that had been reprogrammed so they acted like embryonic stem cells. These so-called induced pluripotent stem cells – iPS cells for short – might one day be used as grow-your-own transplants, made using a patient’s own cells. They’d be a perfect genetic match.

The science isn’t quite there yet but researchers hope iPS cells, which are made without creating a human embryo, would be a more ethically acceptable alternative to human embryonic stem cells. That would be the route to making brain cells to treat human adults, Goldman said.

Related links:

• Baby monkeys have a mixture of cells
• Whole mice made from skin cells
• Corpses produce stem cells

By Charles Choi, LiveScience contributor

Death will come for us all one day, but life will not fade from our bodies all at once. After our lungs stop breathing, our hearts stop beating, our minds stop racing, our bodies cool, and long after our vital signs cease, little pockets of cells can live for days, even weeks. Now scientists have harvested such cells from the scalps and brain linings of human corpses and reprogrammed them into stem cells.

In other words, dead people can yield living cells that can be converted into any cell or tissue in the body.

As such, this work could help lead to novel stem cell therapies and shed light on a variety of mental disorders, such as schizophrenia, autism and bipolar disorder, which may stem from problems with development, researchers say.

Making stem cells
Mature cells can be made or induced to become immature cells, known as pluripotent stem cells, which have the ability to become any tissue in the body and potentially can replace cells destroyed by disease or injury. This discovery was honored last week with the Nobel Prize.

Past research showed this same process could be carried out with so-called fibroblasts taken from the skin of human cadavers. Fibroblasts are the most common cells of connective tissue in animals, and they synthesize the extracellular matrix, the complex scaffolding between cells. [ Science of Death: 10 Tales from the Crypt ]

Cadaver-collected fibroblasts can be reprogrammed into induced pluripotent stem cells using chemicals known as growth factors that are linked with stem cell activity. Reprogrammed cells could then develop into a multitude of cell types, including the neurons found in the brain and spinal cord. However, bacteria and fungi on the skin can wreak havoc on the culturing processes used to grow cells in labs, making the process tricky to successfully carry out.

Now scientists have taken fibroblasts from the scalps and the brain linings of 146 human brain donors and grown induced pluripotent stem cells from them as well.

"We were able to culture living cells from deceased individuals on a larger scale than ever done before," researcher Thomas Hyde, a neuroscientist, neurologist and chief operating officer at the Lieber Institute for Brain Development in Baltimore, told LiveScience. Previous studies had only grown fibroblasts from a total of about a half-dozen cadavers.

The bodies had been dead up to nearly two days before scientists collected tissues from them. The corpses had been kept cool in the morgue, but not frozen.

The researchers found fibroblasts taken from the brain lining, or dura mater, were 16 times more likely to grow successfully than those from the scalp. This was expected, since the scalp is prone to fungal and bacterial contamination just like any other part of the skin. These contaminants can ruin any attempt to grow fibroblasts in lab dishes.

Surprisingly, scalp cells did proliferate more and grew more rapidly than dura mater cells. "This makes sense — the skin is constantly renewing, while the turnover in dura mater is much slower," Hyde said.

Future therapies
Cells from corpses might play a key role in developing future stem cell therapies. Successfully reprogramming induced pluripotent stem cells so they behave like the cells they are meant to replace means that samples of the mimicked cells must be present for comparison. Cadavers can provide brain, heart and other tissues for study that researchers cannot safely obtain from living people.

"For instance, we can compare neurons derived from fibroblasts with actual neurons from the same individual," Hyde said. "It tells us about how reliable a given method for deriving neurons from fibroblasts is. That can be crucial if, for example, you want to create dopamine-making neurons to treat someone with Parkinson's disease."

Studying how induced pluripotent stem cells develop into various tissues could also shed light on disorders that are due to malfunctions in development.

"We're very interested in major neuropsychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, bipolar disease, autism and mental retardation," Hyde said. "By understanding what goes wrong with the brain cells in these individuals, we could perhaps help fix that."

The scientists detailed their findings online Sept. 27 in the journal PLoS ONE.

• Cool Science: 10 Stem Cell Discoveries
• Inside the Brain: A Journey Through Time
• Top 10 Weird Ways We Deal With the Dead 

The federal government may continue to pay for controversial human embryonic stem cell research, a federal appeals court ruled Friday.

The three-judge panel says the government has correctly interpreted a law that bans the use of federal funds to destroy human embryos for research. The ruling is unlikely to put the issue to rest and one of the judges pleaded for Congress to make clear what the government should and should not be able to do.

The hard-to-understand case pits science against mostly religious arguments against using embryos in medical research. It's even more confusing because there are so many differenlt types of cells called stem cells.

Dr. James Sherley of Boston Biomedical Research Institute and Theresa Deisher of AVM Biotechnology in Seattle, who both do research using adult stem cells and oppose the use of human embryonic stem cells, sued in 2009. They said federal guidelines violate the law and would harm their work by increasing competition for limited federal funding.

It’s been back and forth in the federal courts since then, and Sherley has vowed to take the case all the way to the Supreme Court.

The embryonic stem cells at issue are the body’s master cells. Found in days-old embryos, they are the source of all the cells and tissues in the body – blood, brain, bone and muscle.  Researchers are studying them to investigate how disease develops and are using some as transplants to treat diseases from Parkinson’s to cancer. They are being tested in people to repair spinal cord injuries and as a possible cure for some forms of blindness.

Opponents of the research say it’s unacceptable to destroy a human embryo to get the cells. The 1996 Dickey-Wicker amendment, added by Congress to budget language every year, forbids the use of federal funds in research that destroys embryos.

When he was president, George W. Bush decided that the ban extended to human embryonic stem-cell research and greatly limited the federal program.

As one of his first acts after he entered office, President Barack Obama issued an executive order reversing this and encouraging the National Institutes of Health to pay for embryonic stem-cell research, so long as federal money wasn’t used to directly make the stem cells. To get the cells, someone in a private lab using private money has to take apart the embryos – usually left over from fertility clinics and destined for the trash can.  Federal funds may be used to work with the cells that private labs make available.

On Friday, Judge Janice Rogers Brown, Judge David Bryan Sentelle, and Karen LeCraft Henderson of the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington upheld an earlier court ruling throwing out the case. The law, they said “permits federal funding of research projects that utilize already-derived embryonic stem cells—which are not themselves embryos—because no ‘human embryo or embryos are destroyed’ in such projects.”

 “As we have held before, the NIH interpretation of the statute’s actual language is reasonable,’ they added.

"NIH will continue to move forward, conducting and funding research in this very promising area of science. The ruling affirms our commitment to the patients afflicted by diseases that may one day be treatable using the results of this research," NIH director Dr. Francis Collins said in a statement. 

But Judge Brown wasn’t entirely happy and asked Congress to please clear up the unclear wording of the Dickey-Wicker amendment and saying  “there are aspects of this case that … should trouble the heart.”

“Given the weighty interests at stake in this encounter between science and ethics, relying on an increasingly Delphic, decade-old single paragraph rider on an appropriations bill hardly seems adequate,” she wrote in Friday’s opinion.

Supporters of the research said they were thrilled. “This ensures that America’s best scientists can continue to move this work forward despite ideologically driven attempts to derail it,” said Amy Rick, president of the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research.

There are other types of stem cells, including so-called adult stem cells, found in everyone's bodies. But scientists say they don't have the same powerful properties as embryonic stem cells. Labs are also working to re-program ordinary cells to behave like embryonic cells. A deeply divided Congress has decided not to weigh in on the issue until elections give one party or the other more power.

By Dr. Rohan Ramakrishna

Researchers from the University of Munich recently reported that they were able to awaken an 82-year-old woman who’d been in a persistent vegetative state by using injections of her own immune cells.

The woman, who had suffered a stroke, had been cared for at home by her family and a home health nurse -- for nine long years.

Then her doctors proposed an experimental new treatment, offering to give the octogenarian intramuscular injections of her own immune cells, specially activated in the laboratory to produce substances thought to modulate brain activity.

Remarkably, after starting the weekly injections, the patient began to respond to commands and even regain some movement in previously weakened limbs. She opened her eyes and turned toward people entering the room, grabbed the hands of her grandchildren (with both hands) and looked at them, and would voluntarily move her tongue when her teeth were brushed.

Although she’d been on a feeding tube for years, her swallowing reflex even began to return.

The implications of her awakening are truly astounding.

As a neurosurgeon who treats patients with traumatic brain injuries and serious strokes on a daily basis, I'm too often presented with a patient, who despite our team's best efforts, fails to awaken from a coma.

Sometimes the combination of time, patience and a tireless family results in a patient who wakes up six months after their injury. Other times, though, they don't -- primarily because no treatments are available to change the outcome for patients in persistent coma. But perhaps this new research will change that. 

According to the article, published in a recent issue of the Journal of Medical Case Reports, the doctors manipulated the patient’s own cells to somehow restore some brain function nine years after a devastating stroke, a claim few physicians can make.

Their results also suggest that injections of these sorts of cells might even be effective in patients who have recently suffered brain injury.

This news is especially significant since, despite decades of research in neuroscience and behavioral medicine, no therapies have emerged in the last 50 years that systematically reverse coma in patients that have suffered significant strokes or traumatic brain injuries. However, the last decade of neuroscientific research has produced a wealth of data regarding neural responses to injury and potential routes to neuronal rehabilitation and even restoration.

Modern medicine is quite good at rehabilitating patients who are awake but disabled from their brain injury. Specifically, physicians and physiatrists in the field of rehabilitation medicine do a superb job at retraining the mind to rewire around injury and compensate for functions that have been lost.  However, modern medicine still has yet to come up with a solution for patients who do not wake up. That’s why this research is so intriguing.

But these new findings also bring up a host of questions:

Could anything else have possibly explained the patient’s improvement? Were there side effects or potential complications to the treatment? Are there plans to test this treatment in a randomized fashion with a large number of patients?

All of these questions need to be considered before an experimental treatment can be considered for wider use. Until then, this research most certainly qualifies as fringe medicine.

It also reopens the debate regarding the care of patients in coma.

For example, is a person really alive if they are unable to meaningfully interact or comprehend the outside world? How you answer that question is a topic of much controversy, as it brings in religion, politics, medicine and culture (the Terri Schiavo case is a perfect example of how complicated -- and heated -- this issue can become). 

Another pertinent question: Is being alive the same thing as being human, a sentient being? If it isn’t, how do you reconcile the societal cost of medical care for persons who are alive but no longer awake? How do you reconcile the human cost? Does your answer to these questions change if there is a treatment that offers a tiny chance of improving the patient’s comatose condition?

In reality, the vast majority of patients in long-term deep coma or persistent vegetative state do not get better despite treatment. Even the 82-year-old woman who was "reawakened" by the use immune cells injections later died after aspirating her food and developing pneumonia.

However, research aimed at protecting or even restoring brain tissue from permanent damage after injury is always welcomed. It may demand further study, but for now, it offers a glimmer of hope to patients and their families.

Dr. Rohan Ramakrishna is a chief resident in neurological surgery at the University of Washington in Seattle.

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Norbert von der Groeben/Stanford School of Medicine

Amalia Kessler holds her 4-month-old son, Ari, while her husband, Adam Talcott, holds their daughter, Stella, 3. Kessler tried to donate Stella's umbilical cord blood, but was told no public program was available. Thanks in part to her efforts, a public program was begun at the Lucille Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford University, where Kessler was the first donor after Ari's birth in September.

When Amalia Kessler was pregnant with her first child, Stella, in 2008, she knew she didn’t want to waste the baby’s valuable umbilical cord blood, which can be a life-saving source of stem cells used to treat cancer and other diseases.

Private donation was out, despite the barrage of glossy brochures from companies that target expectant parents. 

“I came to the conclusion that there was very little chance that the child I was pregnant with, or any future child, could benefit from any blood that I could bank,” said Kessler, 38, a law professor at Stanford University.

But when she tried to donate the cord blood to a public bank for wider use, Kessler was surprised to learn there was no nearby place that could salvage it. “I called all around,” she recalled.

Three years later, it was a different story. When Kessler delivered her son, Ari, last September, she became the first donor in a brand-new cord blood collection program operated by the Lucille Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford University.

“It felt very good,” said Kessler. “All I did was complain.”

In fact, Kessler’s insistence was part of the impetus for the Packard project, one of a growing number of hospital cord blood collection programs nationwide. The programs, which are free to parents, collect cord blood immediately after birth for listing on the National Be The Match Registry operated by the National Marrow Donor Program network.

Some 200 hospitals now supply 20 U.S. public cord blood banks that are part of the NMDP network, according to Mary Halet, manager for cord blood operations at the agency’s cord blood coordinating center.

Last year, the NMDP helped supply nearly 1,200 transplants from cord blood units, up from 1,000 in 2009, for a total of 6,000 since the program began in 2000. Overall, the number of available cord blood units climbed 14 percent in 2011, with greater increases expected as more hospitals sign on.

“This is a good cause,” explained Dr. Rajni Agarwal, a bone marrow transplant specialist at Packard. “When you talk about a product that is going to be discarded and could be used in saving someone’s life, there’s a very good response.”

All told, the banks provide access to some 165,000 cord blood units in the U.S. for people with life-threatening conditions, including leukemia and immune system and metabolism disorders. Counting international partners, the agency has access to some 425,000 cord blood units worldwide.

Since it formally began in January, the Stanford hospital has banked 15 to 20 units, but expects that figure to grow rapidly from a  maternity unit that sees 5,000 births a year, Agarwal said.

In a market where nearly all cord blood – some 97 percent – is discarded as medical waste, public donation is gaining ground. There is sharp competition from private banks, which typically charge $2,000 to collect the cord blood and additional monthly fees to store it for the family’s future personal use.

Private banks have said they offer parents both individual options and peace of mind.

Medical experts such as the American Academy of Pediatrics have come out against private banking unless parents had an older child with cancer or a genetic disease that could benefit from a sibling’s donation. AAP experts estimate that the chances are only about 1 in 2,700 that a child will need his or her own cord blood to treat disease in the future.

Instead, the AAP has encouraged public banking as a way to increase access to stem-cell therapy. Cord blood does not need to match as closely as bone marrow or other stems cells derived from blood, so it’s a good choice for patients with uncommon tissue types who don’t have a closely matched donor available.

At the Packard hospital, obstetricians have been charged with collecting cord blood. At other places, specific technicians might retrieve the donations. All public donations must be strictly screened and have enough cells to make up a usable dose, at least 200,000 nucleated cells, Agarwal said. Smaller donations may be used for research or are discarded.

New parents who want to donate their babies’ cord blood should check with their local hospital to see if it’s possible.

In Amalia Kessler’s case, she’s glad she spoke up -- and sparked a change that will help others.

“The amazing thing, of course, is it doesn’t cost anybody anything,” she said. “They would throw this stuff out.”

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Scientists may one day slow down aging with a simple injection of youthful stem cells. They’ve just proven this can be done in mice, according to a study published Tuesday in Nature Communications.

The mice, which had been engineered to mimic a human disease called progeria, would normally have grown old when they were quite young.  But that changed when researchers injected muscle stem cells from healthy young mice into the bellies of the quickly aging mice. Within days, the doddering and frail mice began to act like they were living the storyline of “The Strange Case of Benjamin Button” as they started looking and acting younger.

“It was mind boggling,” said study co-author Johnny Huard, a professor of orthopedic surgery at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. “When I saw them I thought, ‘Oh my God, I must have made a mistake and put the normal mice in the wrong cage.’ But they were indeed the mice we’d injected with the stem cells.”

Normal mice live about two years, Hoard explained. But mice with progeria age very quickly and die by the time they are 21 days old.  Somehow the muscle stem-cells from the younger mice managed to reverse that premature aging process – at least temporarily.

The stem-cell injected mice didn’t live as long as normal mice, but they did survive about three times as long as would have without the treatment. Huard suspects if he re-injected the mice they would live even longer.

Huard and his colleagues aren’t exactly sure what’s happening, but they’ve got some theories. Scientists have discovered that we grow frail when our stem cells age and lose the ability to self-repair. These “tired stem cells” divide slowly, Huard explained.

He and his colleagues suspect the same thing happens, just more quickly, in mice and people with progeria.

“People with progeria look like they are in their 80s when they are 20 years old,” Huard said. “Their skin looks very wrinkled and old when they are very young.”

One of the biggest surprises for Huard and his colleagues was the impact on the brain from  muscle stem cells injected into the belly. Even though the cells didn’t get to the brain, they still improved its health.

“The number of blood vessels in the brains of progeria mice are significantly reduced,” Huard said. “But when you inject stem cells from a normal mouse into the belly of the progeria mouse, the number of blood vessels increases.”

That means that the normal stem cells must be releasing some kind of protein that spurs the growth of healthy cells, Huard said.

Huard can the big implications of his research.

“There’s a lot of money being spent in the world trying to delay aging,” he said. “It would be fantastic if we can apply this to human beings. It’s a very simple approach.”

Huard can’t say how far in the future this might be, but his group has been using muscle stem cells to repair damaged hearts, bones, and cartilage.

One day it might be standard for people to stash away stem cells when they are young so they can use this fountain of youth elixir when they start aging, he said.

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