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School of Medicine launches new institute to study stem cell, cancer biology

The Dec. 10 announcement that the School of Medicine would establish a new Institute for Cancer/Stem Cell Biology and Medicine fueled a debate in the media regarding stem cell research.

The institute will be a multi-disciplinary initiative believed to be the first of its kind in the country. It will bring together basic and clinical scientists in a unified effort that will harness the power of stem cell biology and cancer biology to develop novel treatments for cancer as well as other devastating diseases such as diabetes, Parkinson's disease and cardiovascular disease.

An anonymous donor committed $12 million in seed money for the institute, which will be directed by renowned stem cell researcher Irving Weissman, the Karel H. and Avice N. Beekhuis Professor in Cancer Biology.

"This is a major undertaking that will capitalize on Stanford's expertise in stem cell and cancer research. It exemplifies our goal of translating the fruits of laboratory research into therapies that will directly benefit patients," said Philip A. Pizzo, dean of the School of Medicine and a distinguished cancer researcher.

Weissman said research in his lab and elsewhere suggests that in some cancers, such as leukemia, the cancer cells grow and proliferate in much the same way as stem cells. Scientists at the new institute will explore these similarities - along with the search for cancer genes found by other methods - with the goal of developing powerful new therapies to treat cancer, he said.

"What we're doing is examining these two fields that we thought were separate and looking at the overlap that exists between them," Weissman said.

He also noted that stem cells themselves may be used as a treatment for disease. One example of this is in a bone marrow transplant. By using stem cells rather than donor bone marrow cells to reconstitute the bone marrow of cancer patients who have received very high doses of chemotherapy, it may be possible to treat cancer more effectively and eliminate the need for long-term treatment with immune-suppressive drugs. "We need to know if other organ-specific stem cells can simultaneously regenerate other organs destroyed by local therapies," he said.

Weissman said institute scientists also will work to develop methods to generate a new series of pluripotent (also known as embryonic) stem cell lines that will serve as models for a wide range of genetically related disorders including cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune disease, allergies and neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson's and Lou Gehrig's disease.

"We want to translate the advances in pluripotent stem cell research to create lines that represent genetically determined diseases and make these lines available to investigators who want to understand and treat these diseases," he said.

It's how these new stem cells lines will be produced that caused confusion among some members of the media. Weissman said there are two ways that the new institute might generate these stem cell lines. The first is by testing the feasibility of transferring a nucleus into the cell of an existing or modified stem cell line, thus generating a new stem cell line with the DNA of interest. These would not be embryonic stem cell lines.

The second way to generate the stem cell lines is to transfer a nucleus to an egg that has had its nucleus removed. That cell divides seven or eight times to form a small cluster of cells called a blastocyst. The researchers then remove the inner cells from the blastocyst. It's these cells that go on to be the pluripotent stem cell line. This process, done several times in mice, has not yet been successful with human cells.

Weissman said the institute would investigate which approach to use based on extensive work in mice. "We want to establish stem cell lines in the best possible way," he said. Until researchers have studied those methods in mice, they won't know which way will work best in humans.

If the group decides that the best way to generate useful pluripotent stem cell lines is by using a human egg, that work would be subject to review by an internal review board made up of doctors and bioethicists. "They would analyze the risks and benefits and decide if we should go forward," Weissman said. He also said that the group would go through a review board to approve any approach to getting human eggs - including maturing eggs from ovaries removed as part of other surgeries. The egg donors would have to give consent to the research.

While an initial media report erroneously indicated that the stem cell lines might be created through human reproductive cloning, Weissman refuted the claim. "We are unanimously opposed to human reproductive cloning," he said.