The Hindu : Sport : Caution is the name of the game

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Apr 28, 2005

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Caution is the name of the game

Publishing in peer-reviewed journals is imperative as messages may go wrong if first discussed in public fora and not scientific circles.

IT IS a pity that Dolly the sheep was born before therapeutic cloning came up, said Alison Murdoch, Professor of Reproductive Medicine at Newcastle University.

"Therapeutic cloning is a terrible word," she said while referring to how people confuse therapeutic cloning with cloning to produce babies. And the routine practice of cloning sheep, cows, cats and many other animals has only compounded the problem.

It may be recalled that Prof. Murdoch and her team was the first in the U.K. to be granted the licence to clone human embryos by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA). She was recently in Bangalore to attend the `Bangalore Bio 2005' conference.

Prof. Murdoch shot to fame and became a household name in the U.K. and many other countries after she was awarded the licence in August last year. Critics are not far away.

In an article published in The Guardian, she was accused of offering false hopes to patients. "Apart from fertility and conditions relating to infertility, she's never published any paper on strategies for tackling any disease whatsoever," it said.

Providing cell lines

"I don't intend to provide treatment. I will just provide the cell lines and it is for the biotech companies to take it forward to produce products," she clarified.

Cell lines can be created through two routes — from existing (extra) embryos or from surplus eggs from women who have successfully undergone infertility treatment. While extracting stem cells from existing embryos does not involve cloning, the quality of embryos usually does not render them well for stem cell extraction.

"Most of the embryos are of poor quality. A vast majority of them do not give cell lines. We can't do anything with such embryos but just discard them," she said.

"Nearly 80 per cent of the infertile couples are willing to donate cells for stem cell research. But the quality of these cells is poor. Humans are an infertile species and we are getting the poor quality (cells) from this infertile species."

These shortcomings notwithstanding, she is optimistic of securing nearly 1500 eggs for research by the end of the year. She has already produced six cell lines.

But will she elaborate more on the work that she does? "We will not disclose to anybody in the press before it gets published in peer-reviewed journals," she pointed out. "We need to be extremely careful. Patients are eager to know what we are doing. I get hundreds of emails from patients who want to get treatment."

Alas, Prof. Murdoch's scientific approach is diametrically opposite to what happened back home in Delhi. Dr. P. Venugopal, Director of AIIMS, who treated 35 heart patients with autologous adult stem cells chose a local newspaper and not a peer-reviewed journal to spread the message.

Proper way of doing it

"One should make sure that data comes out from peer-reviewed journals. That is the proper way of doing it," she stressed. "The danger is messages go wrong if first discussed in public fora and not scientific circles."

She went further to substantiate her point. "In some cases, reports can be published in peer-reviewed journals in four weeks time," she said. "It's called rapid publication."

Treatment ten years away

There is such a hype for stem cell therapy though it will be 5-10 years before treatment using stem cells becomes a reality. And the recent announcement by the AIIMS Director of the potential that adult stem cells wield has raised the hopes of many patients. And many hospitals are all set to capitalise on it.

"According to health regulations, we can't do a new treatment unless it is a research protocol," she stressed.

Dr. Venugopal had indicated that most of the patients had shown good improvement after autologous stem cell treatment. And he now plans to treat more patients.

"To suggest that a cure has been found without letting your peers (scientists and clinicians) to test your work is displaying arrogance," she remarked. "It's an unproven treatment unless tested." Dwelling on the issue of ethics of using adult stem cells to treat the same patient, Prof. Murdoch made it unequivocally clear that ethics cannot be wished away even if it is an autologous stem cell treatment.

"It is a new treatment. So ethics do come into the picture. The question is what harm or benefit will the new treatment cause," she said. "And if you don't know what harm it does, one has to be careful."

Incidentally, Dr. Venugopal had made it very clear that no ethical issues were involved when treating patients with adult stem cells, as it was a patient's own cells that were being used.

"But for our study, we did take the permission of the AIIMS ethics committee," Dr. Venugopal had said. Prof. Murdoch makes one final observation: "Some mistakes were done in gene therapy and the entire field suffered. If we get too early and if problems occur then people will lose faith in stem cell research."

recently in Bangalore

R. Prasad

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