Keep your eye on the stem cell ball
In a distinct shift of rhetoric, advocates of embryonic stem cell research recently recast its imminent benefits not as revolutionary regenerative medicine but simply as a better research tool for testing traditional small molecule drugs:
[Stem cell research Ian] Wilmut and Klein enthusiastically agreed that the nearer-term promise for stem cell research lies in its potential for aiding the development of new, valuable drugs by testing them on human cultured cells.
"That's a view that I would subscribe to very strongly," Wilmut said.
"There's the potential to accelerate drug development and reduce the cost of drug development with human cell lines," Klein agreed.
A better method of testing drugs is certainly less exciting than regenerating damaged tissues to cure Parkinson's or to enable Christopher Reeve to "get up out of that wheelchair and walk again." And while Californians certainly wouldn't have put up billions of taxpayer dollars if they thought they were just lowering costs for Big Pharma, in a way, I agree with these advocates: Testing drugs seems to be a more feasible, short term potential benefit than a paradigm shift in medicine.
This recent change in language follows a full-day closed-door strategizing session of the International Society for Stem Cell Research, and it recalls to my mind the similar recasting of cloning-based stem cell research. Around three years ago, that theoretical technique to derive stem cells went from a potential way to derive personalized stem cell lines which would not face immune rejection by patients ("your own personal biological repair kit standing by at the hospital"), to merely a method to create a useful laboratory model for a disease (a "disease in a dish").
.jpg){kind=link}