Irv Weisman's own self interest in stem cell therapy

barbara

Pioneer Founding member
Thank you to member Kaye for this very interesting information.


Subject: Fw: Cellerant $13.5M Contract Will Fund Lead Program

Barbara,
I ran across this article on Irving Weissman. Looks like he still has money riding on the approval of his adult stem cell therapy that the military is interested in.
Probably not just for military use. Found this quote from google search of CLT-008. Universal therapy with widespread application.

"CLT-008 is the result of nearly 50 years of research into the adult blood forming system. This research began with the first bone marrow transplants, and culminated in the characterization and isolation of the human blood forming stem cell and its downstream progeny. CLT-008 will be the first adult-stem cell derived product with the potential to become a universal therapy with widespread application. Cellerant intends to develop the drug for the treatment of severely ill patients, as well as a countermeasure to nuclear terror."


http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2008/09/23/3666920.htm You may need to click on this twice to bring it up
 

Kaye

New member
Mouse with human brain cells- Frightening

This was taken from a Washington Post article about stem cells. Make sure to read the last three paragraphs! Frightening at best. This is the guy that wants to keep me from using my own stem cells!

Mice and men
Perhaps the most ambitious efforts to make use of chimeras come from Irving Weissman, director of Stanford University's Institute of Cancer/Stem Cell Biology and Medicine. Weissman helped make the first mouse with a nearly complete human immune system ? an animal that has proved invaluable for tests of new drugs against the AIDS virus, which does not infect conventional mice.

More recently his team injected human neural stem cells into mouse fetuses, creating mice whose brains are about 1 percent human. By dissecting the mice at various stages, the researchers were able to see how the added brain cells moved about as they multiplied and made connections with mouse cells.

Already, he said, they have learned things they "never would have learned had there been a bioethical ban."

Now he wants to add human brain stem cells that have the defects that cause Parkinson's disease, Lou Gehrig's disease and other brain ailments ? and study how those cells make connections.

Scientists suspect that these diseases, though they manifest themselves in adulthood, begin when something goes wrong early in development. If those errors can be found, researchers would have a much better chance of designing useful drugs, Weissman said. And those drugs could be tested in the chimeras in ways not possible in patients.

Now Weissman says he is thinking about making chimeric mice whose brains are 100 percent human. He proposes keeping tabs on the mice as they develop. If the brains look as if they are taking on a distinctly human architecture ? a development that could hint at a glimmer of humanness ? they could be killed, he said. If they look as if they are organizing themselves in a mouse brain architecture, they could be used for research.

So far this is just a "thought experiment," Weissman said, but he asked the university's ethics group for an opinion anyway.

"Everyone said the mice would be useful," he said. "But no one was sure if it should be done."
 
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