One of the most devastating diseases in the black community is Sickle Cell disease. I’ll never forget when a friend’s son died of Sickle Cell. It was a hurting thing. Painful.

Anyone who follows this blog knows I am against stem cell research  in its original form because it calls for the use of tissue from dead and/or aborted fetuses. I have a problem with that from the standpoint of general humanity.

But there is hope. It apperars that scientists are now able to create the stem cells from human skin rather than from dead babies and as a result, they are closer to a cure for Sickle Cell Anemia.

Using a recently developed technique for turning skin cells into stem cells, scientists have cured mice of sickle cell anemia — the first direct proof that the easily obtained cells can reverse an inherited, potentially fatal disease.

Researchers said the work, published in yesterday’s online edition of the journal Science, points to a promising future for the novel cells. Known as iPS cells, they have been touted by President Bush and some scientists as a possible substitute for embryonic stem cells, which have been mired for years in political controversy.

But researchers also cautioned that aspects of the new approach will have to be changed before it can be tried in human patients. Most important, the technique depends on the use of gene-altered viruses that have the potential to trigger tumor growth.

“The big issue is how to replace these viruses,” said Rudolf Jaenisch of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass., who led the new work with co-worker Jacob Hanna and Tim M. Townes of the University of Alabama Schools of Medicine and Dentistry in Birmingham.

“Induced pluripotent stem,” or iPS, cells, are virtually identical to embryonic stem cells. They can morph into all of the more than 200 cell types in the body but are derived from skin, not from embryos. Mouse iPS cells were first derived earlier this year, and scientists reported last month to great fanfare that they had created similar cells from human skin.

The new experiment started with the removal of a few skin cells from the tail tips of mice sick with sickle cell anemia, which can cause painful circulatory problems, kidney failure and strokes.

The researchers converted those skin cells into iPS cells by infecting them with viruses engineered to change the cells’ gene activity so they would resemble embryonic cells.

Using DNA splicing techniques in those cells, the researchers then snipped out the small mutated stretches of DNA that cause sickle cell disease and filled those gaps with bits of DNA bearing the proper genetic code.

Next, the researchers treated the corrected iPS cells with another kind of virus — this time one designed to induce a genetic change that encouraged the cells to mature into bone marrow cells.

Finally, each mouse that gave up a few skin cells at the beginning of the experiment was given an infusion with the corrected marrow cells created from its own skin cells. Those cells set up permanent residence in the animals’ bones and began producing blood cells — the major function of marrow cells — and releasing them by the millions into the circulatory system.

But now the blood cells being produced were free of the sickle cell mutation.

Source

Now can you see why I have such a problem with the PETA people? Mice were used in this study but the PETA people, if they had their way, would put the lives of rodents over the lives of human beings.  That is not normal or acceptable.  Let’s continue to hope and pray for a cure for this devastating disease.

 

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