Human
embryonic stem cells have been grown in the UK for the first time, a
team at King's College London announced on Wednesday.
Its success is
the first since such experiments were approved in Britain.
The researchers say they will use the cells to research
treatments for Parkinson's disease and Type 1 diabetes.
But anti-abortion organisations described the research as
unethical and unnecessary.
IVF source
The King's cell line was grown from an embryo originally created
as part of a course of in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) treatment.
Under UK legislation, embryos created for IVF and not used after
five years must be destroyed.
The
embryo used at King's was one such embryo and was donated to the
researchers by its biological parents, who have finished their IVF
treatment.
At the time the cells were taken from the embryo it was a small
clump of cells a few days old, visible only under a microscope.
Scientists are interested in stem cells because they have the
potential to become virtually any other kind of cell in the body and
so might be used to replace tissues that have failed.
Professor Peter Braude, who led the research team, told the BBC
that the breakthrough of a "bank" of stem cells would greatly help
research in the UK.
Maximise researchers
Stem cells needed to be grown and verified to find out their real
potential and this was difficult with a limited number of embryos,
he said.
"This way we can maximise the number of researchers but minimise
the number of embryos used for this purpose," he said.
He explained that the cells were primitive and scientists were
still a "long way" from turning them into, say, cells to be used in
combating Parkinson's disease.
Dr Stephen
Minger, one of the lead scientists on the King's project, told the
BBC: "The things we're most interested in are Type 1 diabetes and
Parkinson's disease.
"We already know that putting cells into patients with those
diseases works but there's a significant shortage of transplantable
material.
"So our idea is to try to change these cells specifically into
cells that make dopamine or cells that make insulin," he said.
Growing very large numbers of such cells might make it possible
to treat more than just the handful of patients who have currently
been able to receive transplants from conventional sources, Dr
Minger said.
Sharing the cells
There are only around a dozen lines of cells cultivated from
human embryos available to researchers in the world and the creation
of a UK source for the cells will make access in Europe much easier.
Dr Stephen Minger, King's College
London |
Stem
cells were first grown from human embryos over four years ago.
The King's line will be deposited in a European stem cell bank
based in Hertfordshire, England.
The team at King's was one of the first two to gain a licence
from the UK regulatory body in this area - the Human Fertilisation
and Embryology Authority - to carry out such work after the House of
Lords recommended approving human embryonic stem cell research in
2002.
They will now go on to try to develop procedures to guide and
control the growth of stem cells so that they reliably generate
useful types of cell.
Ethical objections
A spokeswoman for the Pro-Life Alliance party, a European
grouping opposed to abortion, told the BBC that the extraction of
stem cells from human embryos was unethical.
And Dr Helen Watt, of the Linacre Centre which advises the
Catholic Church on bio-ethics, said the research violated the human
rights and interests of the embryos.
She said the embryos were only discarded because they were
"chosen to be".
"This [research] is compounding the injustice of what we do to
these embryos by attempting to turn them into pharmaceutical
products."
But Sir George Radda, chief executive of the Medical Research
Council, said the research was legal and used because current
research on adult stem cells had not yet proved a complete success
in finding ways to help human health.
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The things we're most interested in are
Type 1 diabetes and Parkinson's disease 
