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What does the future hold?
Please note, this page is a summary of the full conference speech (click here for the full transcript).
Professor
Richard Gardner
Richard Gardner obtained a First Class degree in physiology at Cambridge in 1966, followed by a PhD under the supervision of Robert Edwards, who with Patrick Steptoe developed human in vitro fertilisation. In 1978 he became Henry Dale Research Professor of the Royal Society in Oxford University and since 2000 he has held the position of chair of the Royal Society working group on stem cells and therapeutic cloning.
For complicated organs like the kidney, the prospects of using stem cells to repair or create replacement organs are very much more remote than for relatively simple systems like the heart.
"I didn't want to come here and be totally pessimistic about this", Professor Gardner told the conference delegates.
"On the other hand I do feel that within the field, the excitement has generated a lot of hype and is in danger of generating unrealistic expectations. We've been through all this before because about 25 years ago we were told that gene therapy was the greatest thing since processed cheese, and it s only now beginning to yield rather meagre returns".
In a succinct summing up of the history of stem cell research, Professor Gardner started with Robert Edwards , his PhD supervisor in Cambridge who with the late Patrick Steptoe pioneered the development of human in vitro fertilisation, which led to the birth of Louise Brown. A second thread was achieved by Martin Evans, who grew a fertilised egg in a mouse up to the blastocyst stage and by replacing it in the womb achieved a pool of unspecialised cells. The third scientific development was nuclear transplantation, where genetic information was taken from a body cell and put into an egg whose maternal genetic information had been removed, leading to Dolly the Sheep.
"One of the things I find unaccountable in this story is that it took our scientific colleagues so long to cotton on the idea of tapping the potential of embryonic stem cells", said Professor Gardner.
The option to grow on the embryos to a later stage was closed by the Human Fertilisation Embrylogy Act, which limited the time you could use embryos up to 14 days. It took until 1998 for the production of the first human embryonic cell lines. This raised the question of whether you needed to use embryonic stem cells because many people for ethical reasons were deeply concerned about the use of these very early stages of development for such purposes.
A third source of stem cells was found in the placenta and the umbilical cord when it is discarded at birth. Adult stem cells avoided the use of early embryos, but in most cases they were difficult to obtain, their growth potential might be rather restricted, and they might have suffered a genetic change during the course of their development.
Looking at the supply of organs for transplantation, Professor Gardner said that after things like Shipman and Alderhey opt-out donation had gone down like a lead balloon. The idea of xenotransplantation, using animals to obtain organs, had suffered great setbacks.
What people were looking at now as an alternative was banks of embryonic stem cells that were pronounced virus free and tissue typed, which could be used for seeding a diseased or damaged organ with healthy stem cells. To solve the problem of matching, therapeutic cloning was being developed, but though this technique worked in animal studies, it might not work in humans.
Please note, this page is a summary of the full conference speech (click here for the full transcript).
Jim
Warham - Patient Presentation 2
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