ethics

Building a new mouse, one stem cell at a time

/ Kevin McCormack / Leave a comment

Science is full of acronyms. There are days where it feels like you need a decoder ring just to understand a simple sentence. A recent study found that between 1950 and 2019 researchers used more than 1.1 million unique acronyms in scientific papers. There’s even an acronym for three letter acronyms. It’s TLAs. Which of course has one more letter than the thing it stands for.

I only mention this because I just learned a new acronym, but this one could help change the way we are able to study causes of infertility. The acronym is IVG or in vitro gametogenesis and it could enable scientists to create both sperm and egg, from stem cells, and grow them in the lab. And now scientists in Japan have done just that and allowed these fertilized eggs to then develop into mice.

The study, published in the journal Science, was led by Dr. Katsuhiko Hayashi of Kyushu University in Japan. Dr. Hayashi is something of a pioneer in the field of IVG. In the past his team were the first to produce both mouse sperm, and mouse eggs from stem cells. But they ran into a big obstacle when they tried to get the eggs to develop to a point where they were ready to be fertilized.

Over the last five years they have worked to find a way around this obstacle and, using mouse embryonic stem cells, they developed a process to help these stem cell-generated eggs mature to the point where they were viable.

In an article in STAT News Richard Anderson, Chair of Clinical Reproductive Science at the University of Edinburgh, said this was a huge achievement: “It’s a very serious piece of work. This group has done a lot of impressive things leading up to this, but this latest paper really completes the in vitro gametogenesis story by doing it in a completely stem-cell-derived way.”

The technique could prove invaluable in helping study infertility in people and, theoretically, could one day lead to women struggling with infertility to be able to use their own stem cells to create eggs or men their own sperm. However, the researchers say that even if that does become possible it’s likely a decade or more away.

While the study is encouraging on a scientific level, it’s raising some concerns on an ethical level. Should there be limits on how many of these manufactured embryos that a couple can create? Can someone create dozens or hundreds of these embryos and then sift through them, using genetic screening tools, to find the ones that have the most desirable traits?

One thing is clear, while the science is evolving, bioethicists, scholars and the public need to be discussing the implications for this work, and what kinds of restraints, if any, need to be applied before it’s RFPT (ready for prime time – OK, I made that one up.)

Stories that caught our eye: frail bones in diabetics, ethics of future IVF, Alzheimer’s

/ Todd Dubnicoff / Leave a comment

The connection between diabetes and frail bones uncovered
Fundamentally, diabetes is defined by abnormally high blood sugar levels. But that one defect over time carries an increased risk for a wide range of severe health problems. For instance, compared to healthy individuals, type 2 diabetics are more prone to poorly healing bone fractures – a condition that can dramatically lower one’s quality of life.

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Bones of the healthy animals (top) form larger calluses during healing which lead to stronger repaired bones. Bones of the diabetic mice (bottom) have smaller calluses and the healed bones are more brittle. Image: Stanford University

To help these people, researchers are trying to tease out how diabetes impacts bone health. But it’s been a complicated challenge since there are many factors at play. Is it from potential side effects of diabetes drugs? Or is the increased body weight associated with type 2 diabetes leading to decreased bone density? This week a CIRM-funded team at Stanford pinpointed skeletal stem cells, a type of adult stem cell that goes on to make all the building blocks of the bone, as important pieces to this scientific puzzle.

Reporting in Science Translational Medicine, the team, led by Michael Longaker – co-director of Stanford’s Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine – found that, compared to healthy animals, type 2 diabetic mice have a reduced number of skeletal stem cells after bone fracture. A study of the local cellular “neighborhood” of these stem cells showed that the diabetic mice also had a reduction in the levels of a protein called hedgehog. Blocking hedgehog activity in healthy mice led to the slow bone healing seen in the diabetic mice. More importantly, boosting hedgehog levels near the site of the fracture in diabetic mice lead to bone healing that was just as good as in the healthy mice.

To see if this result might hold up in humans, the team analyzed hedgehog levels in bone samples retrieved from diabetics and non-diabetics undergoing joint replacement surgeries. Sure enough, hedgehog was depleted in the diabetic bone exactly reflecting the mouse results.

Though more studies will be needed to develop a hedgehog-based treatment in humans, Longaker talked about the exciting big picture implications of this result in a press release:

longaker

Michael Longaker

“We’ve uncovered the reason why some patients with diabetes don’t heal well from fractures, and we’ve come up with a solution that can be locally applied during surgery to repair the break. Diabetes is rampant worldwide, and any improvement in the ability of affected people to heal from fractures could have an enormously positive effect on their quality of life.”

 

Getting the ethics ahead of the next generation of fertility treatments
The Business Insider ran an article this week with a provocative title, “Now is the time to talk about creating humans from stem cells.” I initially read too much into that title because I thought the article was advocating the need to start the push for the cloning of people. Instead, author Rafi Letzter was driving at the importance for concrete, ethical discussion right now about stem cell technologies for fertility treatments that may not be too far off.

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These mice were born from artificial eggs that were made from stem cells in a dish.
It’s great news for infertility specialist but carries many ethical dilemmas. 
(Image: K. Hayashi, Kyushu University)

In particular, he alludes to a paper from October (read our blog about it) that reported the creation of female mouse eggs from stem cells. These eggs were fertilized, implanted into the mother and successfully developed into living mice. What’s more, one set of stem cells were derived from mouse skin samples via the induced pluripotent stem cell method. This breakthrough could one day make it possible for an infertile woman to simply go through a small skin biopsy or mouth swab to generate an unlimited number of eggs for in vitro fertilization (IVF). Just imagine how much more efficient, less invasive and less costly this procedure could be compared to current IVF methods that require multiple hormone injections and retrieval of eggs from a woman’s ovaries.

But along with that hope for couples who have trouble conceiving a child comes a whole host of ethical issues. Here, Letzter refers to a perspective letter published on Wednesday in Science Translation Medicine by scientists and ethicists about this looming challenge for researchers and policymakers.

It’s an important read that lays out the current science, the clinical possibilities and regulatory and ethical questions that must be addressed sooner than later. In an interview with Letzter, co-author Eli Adashi, from the Alpert Medical School at Brown University, warned against waiting too long to heed this call to action:

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Eli Adashi

“Let’s start the [ethical] conversation now. Like all conversations it will be time consuming. And depending how well we do it, and we’ve got to do it well, it will be demanding. It will not be wise to have that conversation when you’re seeing a paper in Science or Nature reporting the complete process in a human. That would not be wise on our collective part. We should be as much as possible ready for that.”

 

 

Tackling Frontotemporal dementia and Alzheimer’s by hitting the same target.
To develop new disease therapies, you usually need to understand what is going wrong at a cellular level. In some cases, that approach leads to the identification of a specific protein that is either missing or in short supply. But this initial step is just half the battle because it may not be practical to make a drug out of the protein itself. So researchers instead search for other proteins or small molecules that lead to an increase in the level of the protein.

A CIRM-funded project at the Gladstone Institutes has done just that for the protein called progranulin. People lacking one copy of the progranulin gene carry an increased risk for  frontotemporal dementia (FTD), a degenerative disease of the brain that is the most common cause of dementia in people under 60 years of age. FTD symptoms are often mistaken for Alzheimer’s. In fact, mutations in progranulin are also associated with Alzheimer’s.

Previous studies have shown that increasing levels of progranulin in animals with diseases that mimic FTP and Alzheimer’s symptoms can reverse symptoms. But little was known how progranulin protein levels were regulated in the cells. Amanda Mason, the lead author on the Journal of Biological Chemistry report, explained in a press release how they tackled this challenge:

“We wanted to know what might regulate the levels of progranulin. Many processes in biology are controlled by adding or removing a small chemical group called phosphate, so we started there.”

These phosphate groups hold a lot of energy in their chemical bonds and can be harnessed to activate or turn off the function of proteins and DNA. The team systematically observed the effects of enzymes that add and remove phosphate groups and zeroed in on one called Ripk1 that leads to increases in progranulin levels. Now the team has set their sights on Ripk1 as another potential target for developing a therapeutic that could be effective against both FTP and Alzheimer’s. Steve Finkbeiner, the team lead, gave a big picture perspective on these promising results:

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Steve Finkbeiner

“This is an exciting finding. Alzheimer’s disease was discovered over 100 years ago, and we have essentially no drugs to treat it. To find a possible new way to treat one disease is wonderful. To find a way that might treat two diseases is amazing.”

 

Stem Cell Experts Discuss the Ethical Implications of Translating iPSCs to the Clinic

/ Karen Ring / Leave a comment

Part of The Stem Cellar blog series on 10 years of iPSCs.

This year, scientists are celebrating the 10-year anniversary of Shinya Yamanaka’s Nobel Prize winning discovery of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). These are cells that are very similar biologically to embryonic stem cells and can develop into any cell in the body. iPSCs are very useful in scientific research for disease modeling, drug screening, and for potential cell therapy applications.

However, with any therapy that involves testing in human patients, there are ethical questions that scientists, companies, and policy makers must consider. Yesterday, a panel of stem cell and bioethics experts at the Cell Symposium 10 Years of iPSCs conference in Berkeley discussed the ethical issues surrounding the translation of iPSC research from the lab bench to clinical trials in patients.

The panel included Shinya Yamanaka (Gladstone Institutes), George Daley (Harvard University), Christine Mummery (Leiden University Medical Centre), Lorenz Studer (Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center), Deepak Srivastava (Gladstone Institutes), and Bioethicist Hank Greely (Stanford University).

iPSC Ethics Panel

iPSC Ethics Panel at the 10 Years of iPSCs Conference

Below is a summary of what these experts had to say about questions ranging from the ethics of patient and donor consent, genetic modification of iPSCs, designer organs, and whether patients should pay to participate in clinical trials.

How should we address patient or donor consent regarding iPSC banking?

Multiple institutes including CIRM are developing iPSC banks that store thousands of patient-derived iPSC lines, which scientists can use to study disease and develop new therapies. These important cell lines wouldn’t exist without patients who consent to donate their cells or tissue. The first question posed to the panel was how to regulate the consent process.

Christine Mummery began by emphasizing that it’s essential that companies are able to license patient-derived iPSC lines so they don’t have to go back to the patient and inconvenience them by asking for additional samples to make new cell lines.

George Daley and Hank Greely discussed different options for improving the informed consent process. Daley mentioned that the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) recently updated their informed consent guidelines and now provide adaptable informed consent templates that can be used for obtaining many type of materials for human stem cell research.  Daley also mentioned the move towards standardizing the informed consent process through a single video shared by multiple institutions.

Greely agreed that video could be a powerful way to connect with patients by using talented “explainers” to educate patients. But both Daley and Greely cautioned that it’s essential to make sure that patients understand what they are getting involved in when they donate their tissue.

Greely rounded up the conversation by reminding the audience that patients are giving the research field invaluable information so we should consider giving back in return. While we can’t and shouldn’t promise a cure, we can give back in other ways like recognizing the contributions of specific patients or disease communities.

Greely mentioned the resolution with Henrietta Lack’s family as a good example. For more than 60 years, scientists have used a cancer cell line called HeLa cells that were derived from the cervical cancer cells of a woman named Henrietta Lacks. Henrietta never gave consent for her cells to be used and her family had no clue that pieces of Henrietta were being studied around the world until years later.

In 2013, the NIH finally rectified this issue by requiring that researchers ask for permission to access Henrietta’s genomic data and to include the Lacks family in their publication acknowledgements.

Hank Greely, Stanford University

Hank Greely, Stanford University

“The Lacks family are quite proud and pleased that their mother, grandmother and great grandmother is being remembered, that they are consulted on various things,” said Hank Greely. “They aren’t making any direct money out of it but they are taking a great deal of pride in the recognition that their family is getting. I think that returning something to patients is a nice thing, and a human thing.”

What are the ethical issues surrounding genome editing of iPSCs?

The conversation quickly focused on the ongoing CRISPR patent battle between the Broad Institute, MIT and UC Berkeley. For those unfamiliar with the technique, CRISPR is a gene editing technology that allows you to cut and paste DNA at precise locations in the genome. CRISPR has many uses in research, but in the context of iPSCs, scientists are using CRISPR to remove disease-causing mutations in patient iPSCs.

George Daley expressed his worry about a potential fallout if the CRISPR battle goes a certain way. He commented, “It’s deeply concerning when such a fundamentally enabling platform technology could be restricted for future gene editing applications.”

The CRISPR patent battle began in 2012 and millions of dollars in legal fees have been spent since then. Hank Greely said that he can’t understand why the Institutes haven’t settled this case already as the costs will only continue to rise, but that it might not matter how the case turns out in the end:

“My guess is that this isn’t ultimately going to be important because people will quickly figure out ways to invent around the CRISPR/Cas9 technology. People have already done it around the Cas9 part and there will probably be ways to do the same thing for the CRISPR part.”

 Christine Mummery finished off with a final point about the potential risk of trying to correct disease causing mutations in patient iPSCs using CRISPR technology. She noted that it’s possible the correction may not lead to an improvement because of other disease-causing genetic mutations in the cells that the patient and their family are unaware of.

 Should patients or donors be paid for their cells and tissue?

Lorenz Studer said he would support patients being paid for donating samples as long as the payment is reasonable, the consent form is clear, and patients aren’t trying to make money off of the process.

Hank Greely said the big issue is with inducement and whether you are paying enough money to convince people to do something they shouldn’t or wouldn’t want to do. He said this issue comes up mainly around reproductive egg donation but not with obtaining simpler tissue samples like skin biopsies. Egg donors are given money because it’s an invasive procedure, but also because a political decision was made to compensate egg donors. Greely predicts the same thing is unlikely to happen with other cell and tissue types.

Christine Mummery’s opinion was that if a patient’s iPSCs are used by a drug company to produce new successful drugs, the patient should receive some form of compensation. But she said it’s hard to know how much to pay patients, and this question was left unanswered by the panel.

Should patients pay to participate in clinical trials?

George Daley said it’s hard to justify charging patients to participate in a Phase 1 clinical trial where the focus is on testing the safety of a therapy without any guarantee that there will be beneficial outcome to the patient. In this case, charging a patient money could raise their expectations and mislead them into thinking they will benefit from the treatment. It would also be unfair because only patients who can afford to pay would have access to trials. Ultimately, he concluded that making patients pay for an early stage trial would corrupt the informed consent process. However, he did say that there are certain, rare contexts that would be highly regulated where patients could pay to participate in trials in an ethical way.

Lorenz Studer said the issue is very challenging. He knows of patients who want to pay to be in trials for treatments they hope will work, but he also doesn’t think that patients should have to pay to be in early stage trials where their participation helps the progress of the therapy. He said the focus should be on enrolling the right patient groups in clinical trials and making sure patients are properly educated about the trial they are participating.

Thoughts on the ethics behind making designer organs from iPSCs?

Deepak Srivastava said that he thinks about this question all the time in reference to the heart:

Deepak Srivastava, Gladstone Institutes

Deepak Srivastava, Gladstone Institutes

“The heart is basically a pump. When we traditionally thought about whether we could make a human heart, we asked if we could make the same thing with the same shape and design. But in fact, that’s not necessarily the best design – it’s what evolution gave us. What we really need is a pump that’s electrically active. I think going forward, we should remove the constraint of the current design and just think about what would be the best functional structure to do it. But it is definitely messing with nature and what evolution has given us.”

Deepak also said that because every organ is different, different strategies should be used. In the case of the heart, it might be beneficial to convert existing heart tissue into beating heart cells using drugs rather than transplant iPSC-derived heart cells or tissue. For other organs like the pancreas, it is beneficial to transplant stem cell-derived cells. For diabetes, scientists have shown that injecting insulin secreting cells in multiple areas of the body is beneficial to Diabetes patients.

Hank Greely concluded that the big ethical issue of creating stem cell-derived organs is safety. “Biology isn’t the same as design,” Greely said. “It’s really, really complicated. When you put something into a biological organism, the chances that something odd will happen are extremely high. We have to be very careful to avoid making matters worse.”

For more on the 10 years of iPSCs conference, check out the #CSStemCell16 hashtag on twitter.

How to handle CRISPR: Formulating a responsible approach to gene-editing

/ Kevin McCormack / Leave a comment

shutterstock_367760708

In February 2016, CIRM sponsored a workshop to discuss the impact of CRISPR, a gene-editing tool that is transforming stem cell research. The workshop was designed to enable the Standards Working Group  (SWG) to reflect on policies governing the review and oversight of embryo research support by CIRM.

After the workshop, we wrote a blog about some of the important questions that came up during the discussion. There is also a written and audio transcript of the meeting here.

Since then, the CIRM Team has been working with the co-chairs of the Standards Working Group to develop draft recommendations for how CIRM could address the workshop questions. The draft recommendations may be found here.

As we noted in June 2015, these deliberations and subsequent recommendations are designed to inform the responsible uses of genome editing technologies with CIRM funds. In particular, CIRM continues to place a priority on funding research that does not receive timely or sufficient federal funding – for example research involving human embryos.

As was discussed at the workshop, donors indicated strong support for embryo research for:

  1. Understanding human development and
  2. Creating stem cell lines.

Genome editing may be applied to both types of research.

The draft recommendations are intended to ensure such work may occur under high ethical standards. After the Standards Working Group review, the final recommendations will be forwarded to CIRM’s governing Board, the ICOC, for approval. We hope that will happen this summer.

Timing is everything: could CRISPR gene editing push CIRM to change its rules on funding stem cell research?

/ Kevin McCormack / 2 Comments

CRISPR

Talk about timely. When we decided, several months ago, to hold a Standards Working Group (SWG) meeting to talk about the impact of CRISPR, a tool that is transforming the field of human gene editing, we had no idea that our meeting would fall smack in the midst of a flurry of news stories about the potential, but also the controversy, surrounding this approach.

Within a few days of our meeting lawmakers in the UK had approved the use of CRISPR for gene editing in human embryos for fertility research —a controversial first step toward what some see as a future of designer babies. And a U.S. Food and Drug Advisory report said conducting mitochondrial therapy research on human embryos is “ethically permissible”, under very limited conditions.

So it was clear from the outset that the SWG meeting was going to be touching on some fascinating and fast moving science that was loaded with ethical, social and moral questions.

Reviewing the rules

The goal of the meeting was to see if, in the light of advances with tools like CRISPR, we at CIRM needed to make any changes to our rules and regulations regarding the funding of this kind of work. We already have some strong guidelines in place to help us determine if we should fund work that involves editing human embryos, but are they strong enough?

There were some terrific speakers – including Nobel Prize winner Dr. David Baltimore; Alta Charo, a professor of Law and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison  ; and Charis Thompson, chair of the Center for the Science, Technology, and Medicine in Society at the University of California, Berkeley – who gave some thought-provoking presentations. And there was also a truly engaged audience who offered some equally thought provoking questions.

CIRM Board member Jeff Sheehy highlighted how complex and broad ranging the issues are when he posed this question:

“Do we need to think about the rights of the embryo donor? If they have a severe inheritable disease and the embryo they donated for research has been edited, with CRISPR or other tools, to remove that potential do they have a right to know about that or even access to that technology for their own use?”

Alta Charo said this is not just a question for scientists, but something that could potentially affect everyone and so there is a real need to engage as many groups as possible in discussing it:

“How and to what extent do you involve patient advocates, members of the disability rights community and social justice community – racial or economic or geographic.  This is why we need these broader conversations, so we include all perspectives as we attempt to draw up guidelines and rules and regulations.”

It quickly became clear that the discussion was going to be even more robust than we imagined, and the issues raised were too many and too complex for us to hope to reach any conclusions or produce any recommendations in one day.

As Bernie Lo, President of the Greenwall Foundation in New York, who chaired the meeting said:

“We are not going to resolve these issues today, in fact what we have done is uncover a lot more issues and complexity.”

Time to ask tough questions

In the end it was decided that the most productive use of the day was not to limit the discussion at the workshop but to get those present to highlight the issues and questions that were most important and leave it to the SWG to then work through those and develop a series of recommendations that would eventually be presented to the CIRM Board.

The questions to be answered included but were not limited to:

1) Do we need to reconsider the language used in getting informed consent from donors in light of the ability of CRISPR and other technologies to do things that we previously couldn’t easily do?

2) Can we use CRISPR on previously donated materials/samples where general consent was given without knowing that these technologies could be available or can we only use it on biomaterials to be collected going forward?

3) Clarify whether the language we use about genetic modification should also include mitochondrial DNA as well as nuclear DNA.

4) What is the possibility that somatic or adult cell gene editing may lead to inadvertent germ line editing (altering the genomes of eggs and sperm will pass on these genetic modifications to the next generation).

5) How do we engage with patient advocates and other community groups such as the social justice and equity movements to get their input on these topics? Do we need to do more outreach and education among the public or specific groups and try to get more input from them (after all we are a taxpayer created and funded organization so we clearly have some responsibility to the wider California community and not just to researchers and patients)?

6) As CIRM already funds human embryo research should we now consider funding the use of CRISPR and other technologies that can modify the human embryo provided those embryos are not going to be implanted in a human uterus, as is the case with the recently approved research in the UK.

Stay tuned, more to come!

This was a really detailed dive into a subject that is clearly getting a lot of scientific attention around the world, and is no longer an abstract idea but is rapidly becoming a scientific reality. The next step is for a subgroup of the SWG to put together the key issues at stake here and place them in a framework for another discussion with the full SWG at some future date.

Once the SWG has reached consensus their recommendations will then go to the CIRM Board for its consideration.

We will be sure to update you on this as things progress.

To modify, or not to modify: Experts discuss human germline modification at WSCS15

/ Karen Ring / Leave a comment

The question of whether human germline modification, or the genetic modification of human reproductive cells, should be allowed or banned was discussed by a panel of experts in the Ethics, Law and Society session during Day 1 of the World Stem Cell Summit.

On the panel were Aubrey de Grey, Chief Science Officer of the SENS Foundation, Paul Knoepfler, Associate Professor at the UC Davis school of medicine (and a CIRM grantee), and Aaron Levine, Associate Professor of Public Policy at Georgia Tech.

Aubrey de Grey, Paul Knoepfler, Aaron Levine

Aubrey de Grey, Paul Knoepfler, Aaron Levine

What Paul Knoepfler said…

On the basic research side, Paul discussed how CRISPR has revolutionized the way germline modification is being done from the older, costly, time-consuming method using homologous recombination to the faster, more efficient, and cheaper gene editing technology that is CRISPR.

In the big picture, he said that, “people will pursue germline modification with a variety of different goals.” He further explained that because this will likely happen in the future, scientists need to consider the risks (off target effects to name one) and the societal and ethical impacts of this technology. Another question he said we should consider is, whether as a society, we support the modification of the germline for health or enhancement reasons.

He concluded with a recap of last week’s International Summit on Human Gene Editing saying that while the organizers didn’t put forth a definitive statement on whether there should be a moratorium on editing the human germline, he himself believes that there should be a temporary moratorium on the clinical use of this technology since the idea is still very controversial and there is no overall consensus within the scientific community.

What Aubrey de Grey said…

Aubrey began by saying that as a gerontologist, he is interested in all potential therapies that could postpone the effects of old age, many of which could involve genetic modification. He went on to say that it might not seem intuitive that editing the human germline would be applicable to fighting aging, but that:

“Even though the medical imperative to engaging genetic germline modification may seem to be less clear in the case of aging than it is for inherited diseases, which people are unequivocally agreed on that is a bad thing, never-the-less, the potential application to aging may actually play a significant role in the debate, because we’ve all got aging.”

He gave an example of the ApoE4 gene. If you have two copies of this form of the gene instead of the normal ApoE3 gene, then you have a very high risk of getting Alzheimer’s disease and atherosclerosis. He posed the question to the audience, asking them whether if they knew that they had this disease causing gene, would they consider genetically altering their fertilized eggs back into the safe ApoE3 version to prevent their offspring from inheriting disease even if the therapy wasn’t approved by the FDA. It’s a hard question to answer and Aubrey further commented that if we begin using genetic modification to prevent one disease, where would we draw the line and where would modification end?

He ended with saying that the real question we need to consider is “whether people will want to do germline modification against aging, even though the modifications may really be more in the way of enhancements than genuine therapies.”

What Aaron Levine said…

Aaron Levine began with saying that the question of human germline modification is an old question with new twists. By new twists he meant the recent advances in gene editing technologies like CRISPR and Zinc Finger Nucleases. He further commented that the baseline question of this debate is whether we should modify the DNA of the germline, and that how we do it isn’t as significant.

He played devil’s advocate by saying that germline editing would greatly benefit single gene disorders, but that we should think of the full spectrum. Many traits that we might want, we don’t know enough about and attempting to add or remove these traits using gene editing would be like shooting in the dark.

On policy side, Aaron commented that international policy harmonization would be nice, but that we should treat it skeptically. He said that not everyone is going to agree or follow the same rules and we need to consider this going forward. As for the FDA, he said that its role and regulations regarding germline editing aren’t clear and that these need to be defined.

One really interesting point he made was the issue of unproven stem cell clinics. They exist and pose a huge risk to human health. The real question, he said, is could this turn into unproven CRISPR clinics around the world? He ended with saying that someone will claim to offer this technology soon and asked what we should do about it.

From the peanut gallery…

One of the questions asked by the audience was whether it’s just a matter of time that one of the world’s governments might go forward with human germline modification because of the huge medical implications.

Paul responded first saying that there was a consensus at the gene editing summit that it’s more of a question of when, rather than if this would happen. Aaron agreed and said that he believed it would happen but wasn’t sure when, and followed with saying that the more important question is how it will be done, overseen, and what reasons the editing will be done for.

Bernie Siegel, who is the co-Chair of the World Stem Cell Summit, spoke at the end and said that the panel delivered exactly what he hoped it would. He emphasized a theme that I didn’t mention in this blog but that was brought up by each of the panelists: the voice of patients.

“One of the things missing from the [International Summit on Gene Editing] meeting was the voice of the patient community. Do they understand the concepts of CRISPR technology? Patients are a major stake holder group, and they have the most influence on creating change in policy. When we talk about a moratorium, the patients see it as a five-alarm fire. All they want is to see a few drips of water, and they can’t get it. From a societal and popular culture standpoint, these are a whole group of people that will be experiencing the sweeping changes of biotech today. When those voices that are receiving these technologies enter the conversation, it will be a full debate.”

When Hope Runs up against Reality: Balancing Patient Optimism with Medical Evidence

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One of the big concerns among scientists – including many at the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) conference in Vancouver, Canada – is that patient expectations about stem cells are often greater than researchers are able to deliver today. That can result in patients in search of a cure heading to overseas clinics that offer unproven therapies.

Megan Munsie – head of the Education, Ethics, Law and Community Awareness Unit at the University of Melbourne in Australia – wanted to find out what happens when patients’ hopes for new treatments come into conflict with scientific views on medical evidence. So she started with a small survey of 16 Australians, patients and patient-caretakers, who had travelled outside Australia for stem cell treatments for a variety of diseases including MS and cerebral palsy.

She says there were a number of interesting findings:

  • They all considered themselves pro-active and well-informed
  • They rejected advice from their own doctor but instead relied on the overseas doctor selling them the treatment for advice
  • They felt they had no choice but to travel overseas because they were running out of time and options in Australia
  • They didn’t consider the health risks, believing that the worst that would happen is that the “treatment” wouldn’t work and they would have spent a lot of money for nothing

Perhaps the most surprising finding was that all of them talked about the “benefits” they gained from going abroad for the treatment, that it gave them a sense of hope even if there was no evidence of medical benefit.

What happens when patients’ hopes for new treatments come into conflict with scientific views on medical evidence?

What happens when patients’ hopes for new treatments come into conflict with scientific views on medical evidence?

This led to a bigger study where Munsie surveyed patients and patient advocates but also stem cell scientists and physicians. Not surprisingly the researchers had a very different view of the subject than the patients.

Researchers/doctors said they felt that patients don’t understand science and don’t appreciate the subtleties of clinical trials

  • They said patients were basing their decisions not on science but desperation
  • They considered overseas providers as dubious, selling hope and taking advantage of a vulnerable patient population

What was interesting, however, is that many doctors said they didn’t try to persuade their patients not to go, instead they chose to respect their autonomy but did at least try to give them the facts so that they could make a decision based on knowledge not ignorance.

When asked why they didn’t tell patients not to go, they said they respected the patients’ need for hope and didn’t want to take that away from them because they had nothing they could offer to replace it.

Munsie says recently some doctors have started offering these kinds of unproven therapies in Australia. She talked to four of them asking how they could justify it. All four said there is a huge unmet medical need and it was better to offer these therapies in Australia than have patients travel to other countries for them. They also said that they felt competent to provide treatment because they had undergone some kind of training or had a license to use equipment needed for the therapy.

Ironically while they all considered themselves legitimate providers of a needed medical therapy – albeit an unproven one – and only interested in the science, they regarded others doing the same as “cowboys” and only interested in the money.

When asked if they would support more regulation of the kinds of therapies they were already offering they said yes, saying that the other doctors who claimed they were “self-regulating” is like “giving the keys to the asylum to the lunatics.”

Munsie says it’s clear that it’s not just patients who could benefit from some guidance on expectations about stem cell therapies.

She says we need to do a better job of managing patient expectations without robbing them of a sense of hope, perhaps by offering them information that is more tailored to their particular needs.

We also need to manage what she called “the unbridled enthusiasm of providers” who are offering speculative treatments as “medical practice”. That might take regulatory change by the government.

She says it’s difficult to strike a balance between hope and scientific evidence, in maintaining a patient’s sense of optimism while acknowledging the reality of the science and the risks posed by unproven treatments.

Kevin McCormack

When Hope Runs up against Reality: Balancing Patient Optimism with Medical Evidence

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One of the big concerns among scientists – including many at the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) conference in Vancouver, Canada – is that patient expectations about stem cells are often greater than researchers are able to deliver today. That can result in patients in search of a cure heading to overseas clinics that offer unproven therapies.

Megan Munsie – head of the Education, Ethics, Law and Community Awareness Unit at the University of Melbourne in Australia – wanted to find out what happens when patients’ hopes for new treatments come into conflict with scientific views on medical evidence. So she started with a small survey of 16 Australians, patients and patient-caretakers, who had travelled outside Australia for stem cell treatments for a variety of diseases including MS and cerebral palsy.

She says there were a number of interesting findings:

  • They all considered themselves pro-active and well-informed
  • They rejected advice from their own doctor but instead relied on the overseas doctor selling them the treatment for advice
  • They felt they had no choice but to travel overseas because they were running out of time and options in Australia
  • They didn’t consider the health risks, believing that the worst that would happen is that the “treatment” wouldn’t work and they would have spent a lot of money for nothing

Perhaps the most surprising finding was that all of them talked about the “benefits” they gained from going abroad for the treatment, that it gave them a sense of hope even if there was no evidence of medical benefit.

What happens when patients’ hopes for new treatments come into conflict with scientific views on medical evidence?

What happens when patients’ hopes for new treatments come into conflict with scientific views on medical evidence?

This led to a bigger study where Munsie surveyed patients and patient advocates but also stem cell scientists and physicians. Not surprisingly the researchers had a very different view of the subject than the patients.

Researchers/doctors said they felt that patients don’t understand science and don’t appreciate the subtleties of clinical trials

  • They said patients were basing their decisions not on science but desperation
  • They considered overseas providers as dubious, selling hope and taking advantage of a vulnerable patient population

What was interesting, however, is that many doctors said they didn’t try to persuade their patients not to go, instead they chose to respect their autonomy but did at least try to give them the facts so that they could make a decision based on knowledge not ignorance.

When asked why they didn’t tell patients not to go, they said they respected the patients’ need for hope and didn’t want to take that away from them because they had nothing they could offer to replace it.

Munsie says recently some doctors have started offering these kinds of unproven therapies in Australia. She talked to four of them asking how they could justify it. All four said there is a huge unmet medical need and it was better to offer these therapies in Australia than have patients travel to other countries for them. They also said that they felt competent to provide treatment because they had undergone some kind of training or had a license to use equipment needed for the therapy.

Ironically while they all considered themselves legitimate providers of a needed medical therapy – albeit an unproven one – and only interested in the science, they regarded others doing the same as “cowboys” and only interested in the money.

When asked if they would support more regulation of the kinds of therapies they were already offering they said yes, saying that the other doctors who claimed they were “self-regulating” is like “giving the keys to the asylum to the lunatics.”

Munsie says it’s clear that it’s not just patients who could benefit from some guidance on expectations about stem cell therapies.

She says we need to do a better job of managing patient expectations without robbing them of a sense of hope, perhaps by offering them information that is more tailored to their particular needs.

We also need to manage what she called “the unbridled enthusiasm of providers” who are offering speculative treatments as “medical practice”. That might take regulatory change by the government.

She says it’s difficult to strike a balance between hope and scientific evidence, in maintaining a patient’s sense of optimism while acknowledging the reality of the science and the risks posed by unproven treatments.

Kevin McCormack