What better
follow-up to last week’s story on harvesting the tissue? As
mentioned in that article, fetal tissue has been harvested for medical research
for years. Even before abortion was legalized, other sources were tapped, and
according to an article by AP science writer Malcolm Ritter, this practice
dates back to the 1930s.
Ritter, and
many others, like to invoke the 1954 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. As
Ritter puts it, “The 1954 Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded for work with
fetal tissue that led to developing a vaccine against polio.” Not so fast…
According to
the Nobel Foundation, that particular prize was awarded jointly to John
Franklin Enders, Thomas Huckle Weller, and Frederick Chapman Robbins “for their
discovery of the ability of poliomyelitis viruses to grow in cultures of
various types of tissue.” Indeed, many types of tissue were used besides human
embryonic tissue, and the famous Salk vaccine itself was cultured in monkey
kidney tissue.
Beware, then,
of intentionally misleading statements that are circulating such as:“Research
on fetal tissue has yielded some major discoveries: The polio vaccine was
derived from cultured fetal kidney cells.” Usually, this segues into a list of
diseases in which research with fetal cells is ongoing, such as AIDS,
Parkinson’s, and muscular dystrophy. Conspicuously absent, though, are any
useful findings—not to mention breakthrough therapies.
A more accurate
(and persuasive) presentation by Ritter would have focused on certain vaccines
which are cultured in human cell lines, such as WI-38 and MRC-5. The WI-38 cell
line was developed in July, 1962 from lung tissue taken from a therapeutically
aborted fetus of about three months gestational age. The MRC-5 cell line was
developed in September, 1966 from lung tissue taken from a 14 week aborted
fetus. There is also PER.C6, developed in 1985, from an 18 week aborted fetus,
used currently in research to develop vaccines to treat Ebola and HIV.
The allure of
fetal tissue lines for vaccine production is based on their purity. Notably,
the potentially cancer-causing SV40 (Simian) virus was found in stocks of the
Salk polio vaccine. Still, considering that cell lines can be developed from a
single cell, and have been carefully cultured for decades, an endless stream of
new fetal tissue is not required in this endeavor.
Let’s take a
glimpse at some of the research using human fetal tissue, funded by NIH.
Fortunately, NIH provides a ready reference to the programs it sponsors,
including a robust search facility. To set a context, NIH will spend around $30
billion on medical research in FY2015. The agency uses the term
“invests,”front-loading the notion of a return; but I digress.
If we do a
query on “human fetal tissue” for FY2014, we discover that $76 million was
spent in total, with around $72 million going outside the agency. This would
cover 158 outside projects, with an average grant value of $457,000. The
smallest grant was $33,000, and the largest was $4.9 million. (Isn’t Excel
great?) Absent a detailed audit of each project, the amount actually spent on
fetal tissue is unknown.
The big grant,
2.5 times larger than the one in second place, went to the lab of Prof. Ehud
Isacoff (UC Berkeley), under the Nanomedicine Initiative. This work aims “to
develop molecularly focused methods for dynamic manipulation of specific
proteins in the complex environment of cells, which can be used in intact
tissues, and, indeed, in the live animal.” Bear in mind that this is hard-core
“sexy” sounding molecular biological research, far more suited to obtaining
giant grants than advancing practical medicine.
Second place,
for a mere $1.9 million, went to another neurobiologist, Prof. Nenad Sestan
(Yale). This work will “employ novel methods and approaches to generate a
systematic inventory/census of cell types and connections in the developing and
adult human, macaque monkey and mouse prefrontal cortex,” which “may lead to
creation of new and more effective treatments of major brain disorders.”Sure
thing.
And, what of
the smallest grant? It went to Perry Meng-Che Tsai (University of NC-Chapel
Hill) for “Investigating graft-versus-host clearance of HIV-infected cells in
vivo.” If you can get past the sketchy humanized mouse thing he proffers, the
idea of a cure for HIV (or at least freedom from a lifetime of meds), in light
of related positive results from bone marrow transplants, is not too shabby.
What can we
conclude? The most legitimate use of fetal tissue is to establish cell lines
used in vaccine production, but precious little raw stock (so to speak) is
needed for that. As to the quantity of the tissue being used for research that
is important, or even worthwhile, without a rigorous analysis of each
NIH-sponsored program, and those sponsored by private foundations, we would be
guessing.
If you press
me, my guess is…not too much.
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