GERON’S EMBRYONIC “WASTE OF TIME” CONTINUES…

Here’s an 867 word article I’d like to not waste your time with.

The premise is:  “The study is not meant to determine whether the stem cells can cure or even improve the patients’ condition, but to find out if the treatment itself is safe. Researchers will be monitoring patients over the following months and years to look for side effects, including possible benign tumor growth if the stem cells start to replicate, or adverse immune reactions.”

So let’s not waste your time, I’ll give you the results right now:

EMBRYONIC STEM CELL = ESC

• SOURCE/DERIVED FROM•comes from embryos
• PURPOSE IN BODY•split for 7 weeks until you have a fetus the size of a thumbnail
• OBSTACLES+SIDE EFFECTS•they create cysts and tumors, rejection requires immunosuppressive drugs for the ill patient, they carry the genetic anomalies of the donor, etc
• TREATMENT HISTORY•can currently treat zero diseases, probably need to cure cancer first to use them

Read it if you want but that’s really “all she wrote.“  Then again, this will allow billions to be pumped into embryonic research for treatments over “the following months and years” despite this fact…

SCREW THE EMBRYOS, THEY’RE IRRELEVANT!

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Paralyzed patient in major Geron stem cell study

Erin Allday, Chronicle Staff Writer, Wednesday, September 21, 2011

A Bay Area patient who recently suffered a serious spinal cord injury and is now paralyzed from the waist down joined the world’s first-ever embryonic stem cell study in humans last week, when Stanford doctors injected 2 million cells designed to replace damaged neurons in the patient’s spine.

The patient, who is not being identified, is the fourth person to be enrolled in the clinical trial being run by Menlo Park’s Geron Corp. and the first person in California. The patient, whose participation in the trial was revealed Tuesday, received the stem cell injection Saturday at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center and is now at the rehabilitation center there.

The study is not meant to determine whether the stem cells can cure or even improve the patients’ condition, but to find out if the treatment itself is safe. Researchers will be monitoring patients over the following months and years to look for side effects, including possible benign tumor growth if the stem cells start to replicate, or adverse immune reactions…

Read more

ADULT CELLS, STEM CELLS & CANCER

Wow, this one was devious!! Some of these articles must be read very carefully as they are misleading and confusing, perhaps even intentionally so.

They start by telling you ‘adult stem cells‘ may fight cancer….

but later in the article refer to them as ‘adult cells…’

and even later as ‘induced pluripotent stem cells.’

But don’t be fooled by this semantic sleight of hand.

Induced pluripotent stem cells are semantically ‘adult cells’ only in the sense that all cells in an adult can be referred to as adult cells.  Perhaps this is the author’s attempt to make them distinct from embryonic cells. In any case, if your friend asks you for an APPLE from the MARKET, it is not acceptable to bring him back a BAG OF FLOUR just because they both can be “found at a MARKET.”

ANd let’s be clear.  Only ADULT STEM CELLS have thousands of studies and trials and thousands of patients treated safely and effectively.  Induced pluripotent stem cells have NONE.  And while Induced pluripotent stem cells ARE a manipulated type of ‘stem cell,’ they have a lot of problems too, as the article owns up to (one of the problems) in the end:

“potential side effects need to be considered. iPS cells may develop into other harmful cells in the body.”

              “other harmful cells in the body”  =  tumors, cysts, cancer

THEY HAVE TO SOLVE THE ISSUES OF REJECTION & CANCER BEFORE THEY CAN

1. USE THESE CELLS TO COMBAT CANCER!!
   
2. USE THESE CELLS IN STEM CELL TREATMENTS!!

(dichotomy? I think so, makes me think of vaccines where you get injected with the disease to build anti-bodies to the disease.)

But the good news is, there are cancer treatments out there with high results and low or virtually no side effects that make chemo and radiation look ineffective and barbaric by comparison!

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Stem cells, potential source of cancer-fighting T cells

ScienceDaily (Sep. 20, 2011) — Adult stem cells from mice converted to antigen-specific T cells — the immune cells that fight cancer tumor cells — show promise in cancer immunotherapy and may lead to a simpler, more efficient way to use the body’s immune system to fight cancer, according to Penn State College of Medicine researchers.

“Cancer immunotherapy is a promising method to treat cancer patients,” said Jianxsun Song, Ph.D., assistant professor, microbiology and immunology. “Tumors grow because patients lack the kind of antigen-specific T cells needed to kill the cancer. An approach called adoptive T cell immunotherapy generates the T cells outside the body, which are then used inside the body to target cancer cells.”

It is complex and expensive to expand T cell lines in the lab, so researchers have been searching for ways to simplify the process. Song and his team found a way to use induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, which are adult cells that are genetically changed to be stem cells.

“Any cell can become a stem cell,” Song explained. “It’s a very good approach to generating the antigen-specific T cells and creates an unlimited source of cells for adoptive immunotherapy.”

By inserting DNA, researchers change the mouse iPS cells into immune cells and inject them into mice with tumors. After 50 days, 100 percent of the mice in the study were still alive, compared to 55 percent of control mice, which received tumor-reactive immune cells isolated from donors.

Researchers reported their results and were featured as the cover story in a recent issue of the journal Cancer Research.

A limitation of this potential therapy is that it currently takes at least six weeks for the iPS cells to develop into T cells in the body. In addition, potential side effects need to be considered. iPS cells may develop into other harmful cells in the body.

Researchers are now studying how to use the process in human cells.

Other researchers on this paper are Fengyang Lei, and Rizwanul Haque, Department of Microbiology and Immunology; Lynn Budgeon and Neil D. Christensen, Ph.D., Department of Pathology, Penn State College of Medicine.

This study was funded through the Pennsylvania Department of Health using Tobacco Settlement Funds, the W.W. Smith Charitable Trust and the Melanoma Research Foundation.