Danger in Fetal Tissue Transplants

 

DEVASTATING SIDE EFFECTS ACCOMPANY FETAL TISSUE TRANSPLANTS

 

By Dave Andrusko
Editor’s note. As most of our NRL News Today readers already know, the hype surrounding embryonic stem cell research is proving to be every bit as overblown as we said it was. But many probably don’t know there was an even greater commotion about fetal tissue transplants—literally scavenging the brains of aborted babies which purportedly would cure everything from AIDS to the common cold—10 or 15 years ago. That too was bogus, as this story from the March 2001, edition of National Right to Life News demonstrates. This story is part of our year-long “Roe at 40” series that brings you some of the best reporting  from NRL News going all the way back to 1973. 
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New York Times reporter Gina Kolata

As NRL News goes to press, a horrific report in the March 8 edition of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) rips to shreds the myth that brain tissue taken from aborted babies possesses almost magical powers to cure an assortment of neurological ailments, starting with Parkinson’s.

Instead, not only are patients not improving, “in about 15 percent of patients, the cells apparently grew too well, churning out so much of a chemical that controls movement that the patients writhed and jerked uncontrollably,” the New York Times reported. The Times and the Washington Post have been the loudest media cheerleaders for the simplistic notion that injecting fetal cells into selected areas of a patient’s brain would somehow “cure” him.
Dr. Paul E. Greene described as “absolutely devastating” some of the uncontrollable movements suffered by patients.

“They chew constantly, their fingers go up and down, their wrists flex and distend,” Greene told the Times. Moreover, “the patients writhe and twist, jerk their heads, fling their arms about,” Gina Kolata reports in the newspaper’s March 8 edition.
Greene said one man could no longer eat on his own, and requires a feeding tube.
“It was tragic, catastrophic,” he said. “It’s a real nightmare.” Ominously he added, “And we can’t selectively turn it off.”

Other instances of transplants gone wrong included a situation where these bizarre disorders came and went randomly throughout the day. In response, Greene’s position, at least for now, is unambiguous.
“No more fetal transplants,” he told the Times. “We are absolutely and adamantly convinced that this should be considered for research only. And whether it should be research in people is an open question.”
But others insisted the experiments in humans should go forth.

One was Dr. J. William Langston, who said, “This is still our one great hope for a cure.” Langston is scientific director and chief executive officer at The Parkinson’s Institute in Sunnyvale, California.
Even less surprising were the go-for-it remarks of Dr. Curt Freed, who headed the study. Preliminary results reported by Freed and associates in April 1999 suggested the possibility of an ever-so-small improvement, but only in younger patients. Parkinson’s is a disease almost exclusively of the elderly.
Freed was undeterred by the results reported in the NEJM. “To say that you can’t do or shouldn’t do human research because the research has uncertain outcome, I think would be a bad decision,” he told the Times.

But the news grows worse. These grotesque side effects mimic those sometimes seen when drugs are used to attempt to control Parkinson’s and the dosage levels are too high.
The solution there is to cut down on the drugs. But with transplanted cells there is no way to de-active them or remove them.
Six patients who enrolled in the study but who had not yet had the implants will forgo it on the researchers’ advice.

These devastating side effects bear out concerns expressed for many years in NRL News by neurologists who warned that taking tissue from aborted babies was both terrible ethics and awful medicine. Not enough preliminary work had been done in animals, for one thing.
Parkinson’s disease is generally thought to be caused by the death of cells that make dopamine, a chemical that transmits messages in the brain.

But critics noted that Parkinson’s is a complicated, layered disease unlikely to be cured merely by injecting fetal cells into an area of the patient’s brain where cells producing dopamine have died.
Indeed, in Freed’s preliminary results, two-thirds of patients showed at least a 20% increase in dopamine from the area in which the fetal cells were transplanted. Yet older patients showed no functional improvement at all.

Source: NRLC News