02/27/06

By Jonathan Rabinovitz

The widely watched television news show, “60 Minutes,” heralded the revolutionary healing potential of embryonic stem cells in a Feb. 26 report—the night before a trial that could determine whether $3 billion will become available in California for stem cell research.

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Included in the program was an interview with Robert Robbins, MD, chair of Stanford’s Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery, discussing the possibility of helping patients recover from heart attacks by rebuilding heart muscle with injections of embryonic stem cells. Robbins and colleagues have done such a procedure in mice with severe cardiac disease and had promising results.

“There’s a lot of enthusiasm for this area of research,” Robbins told “60 Minutes” correspondent Ed Bradley. “There’s great hope for patients that suffer from heart failure that may be too old or can’t get a heart transplant. And a heart transplant is a big operation. You would much prefer having a therapy that you could go out of the hospital with just a Band-Aid on your leg versus having a big operation.”

But the show noted that the funding needed to make such therapies a reality was in doubt. President George W. Bush has restricted support for research in this field because of his view that life begins at conception: The source of the cells is early-stage human embryos, or blastocysts. The blastocyst is destroyed when the cells are removed.

Although California voters resoundingly approved a measure—Proposition 71—in November 2004 that would provide $3 billion for scientists to conduct stem cell research, that money has yet to be disbursed because of legal challenges, brought in part by anti-abortion groups, as to whether the proposition’s funding mechanism violates the California constitution.

The trial started today in Alameda County Superior Court. It is generally expected that the court’s decision will be appealed up the ladder and will ultimately come before the state Supreme Court. In the meantime, the stem cell agency established by Prop. 71 is not able to sell the state bonds that would be the source of the research money.

In his interview with the CBS program, Robbins showed a petri dish of cells that were pulsating as if they were part of a beating heart. “These are the cells that go to make up the heart muscle cells,” Robbins explained. “They all started out as cells from embryos with the potential to develop into any type cell.”

It was a vivid demonstration of how scientists hope to be able to manipulate embryonic stem cells to grow into any one of a multitude of human tissues or organs. And it raises the possibility of a day in the future when doctors will be able to cure diseases and heal injuries by regenerating tissues in the body that have been ravaged by disease or accident, whether it be to replace cells in the pancreas that have failed in people with diabetes or to grow new nerve connections in paralyzed people who have suffered spinal cord injuries.

But such developments are not assured and, even in the best-case scenarios, there’s much more work that needs to be done before they can be used as routine therapies for people. While the “60 Minutes” report mentioned two potential uses for embryonic stem cells—one to help people replace severed nerve cells, the other to help children suffering from a fatal brain disease—that are ready to begin clinical trials, that process generally takes years. And no one knows yet whether the studies will uncover serious side effects in these particular applications or whether the treatments are as effective in humans as they were in laboratory animals.

In the meantime, Robbins noted that he is receiving many inquiries from heart patients interested in pursuing stem cell treatment. Yet it’s way too soon to be thinking of using such a therapy in humans, he told Bradley. “I would say that it’s at least five to 10 years away before I think that we will have enough definitive data in animal studies that it will be safe to go forward with embryonic stem cells [injected into human hearts],” Robbins said.