Massachusetts Daily Collegian

A free and responsible press serving the UMass community since 1890

A free and responsible press serving the UMass community since 1890

Massachusetts Daily Collegian

A free and responsible press serving the UMass community since 1890

Massachusetts Daily Collegian

Federal funds for stem cell research

University of Massachusetts campuses, specifically the UMass Medical School at Worcester, hope to use newly granted federal funds to make big leaps in human stem cell research.

The funds were made available following President Barack Obama’s executive order in March to lift the ban for federally funded research on stem cells.

The ban, known as the Dickey-Wicker amendment, first became a law in 1996. It strictly banned the use of federal dollars human embryos for research in which embryos are destroyed, discarded or subjected to risk of injury.

In August 2001, President Bush loosened the Dickey-Wicker amendment by ordering that tax dollars could be used for embryonic studies. However, the amendment was loosened for only a limited number of stem cell lines which had already extracted from embryos.

According to Gary Stein, professor of cell biology at UMass Medical, there were not enough lines ‘for someone to effectively work with.’

President Obama’s decision to lift the ban for federally funded research releases state government funds to support human embryonic stem cell research on not only lines already in existence but on ones yet to be created.

UMass Medical and potentially UMass Amherst hope to reap the benefits of the federally granted dollars towards stem cell research in the near future.

The exact amount of federal funding for the research in the next year is unknown; there is no official budget for such spending. The allocation of federal money to stem cell researchers is contingent on the decisions of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is a part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIH is the primary federal agency for conducting and supporting medical research.

Stein speculates that researchers at the Medical School and possibly at UMass Amherst will begin to see funding for human stem cell applications as early as fall 2009. The federally granted money from Obama’s stimulus plan is intended to extend research and therefore potentially create more job opportunities for people in this field.

The UMass Medical Human Embryonic Stem Cell Core Facility ‘has the most comprehensive stem cell registry globally,’ according to Stein, who is also the director of the stem cell registry at UMass Medical.

Back in 2007, Massachusetts granted an estimated $3 million to UMass Medical to establish a human embryonic stem cell bank and registry and make it operational via training. The school is fully equipped to train researchers to become experts in the field of stem cells.

UMass Medical is currently working on 25-30 applications dealing with the research of human stem cells.

Stem cell researchers traditionally work with two kinds of stem cells from animals and humans: non-embryonic, or ‘adult’ stem cells, and embryonic stem cells. Adult stem cells are derived from human tissue that can renew itself and grow to acquire the features of the tissue it came from, such as a heart, liver or muscle cell. However, adult stem cells are limited to the tissue where they are derived.

‘I don’t think you could truly use adult stem cells by that method ‘hellip; its very labor intensive,’ said Rafael Fissore, professor of Biology at UMass Amherst, on the use of adult stem cells.

Embryonic stem cells, the most controversial, are therefore worked with in hopes for finding more effective methods of research. Embryonic stem cells are derived from developing embryos, giving rise to the controversy of extracting embryonic stem cells that have the potential to become a wide variety of specialized cell types. Given their unique regenerative abilities, stem cells can open new doors to treating a wide spectrum of diseases.

With the new funds, researchers at UMass Medical are enthusiastic about working with embryonic cells to treat diseases like cancer, diabetes, muscular, skeletal and neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s, Amyotrophic lateral Sclerosis (ALS) and Parkinson’s Disease. ‘ ‘ ‘

‘There is increased funding for biomedical research out there and with the new guidelines there can be a lot more stem cell investigations. The changes in the guidelines are really going to position us to do a lot more involving stem cell research. Many more questions are going to be answered,’ said Stein.

One of the many important questions Stein said stem cell investigators expect to answer involves how pluripotent stem cells can be used successfully. Pluripotent stem cells are cells that can specialize in any bodily tissue. The cells are channeled along a certain lineage so it will become a cell tissue or organ ‘which becomes important for regenerative medicine,’ Stein said.

Pluripotent stem cells are traditionally used
when working with regenerating organs for degenerative diseases.

UMass Medical’s advanced medical facility gives scientists access to these pluripotent human stem cells, which scientists at UMass Amherst currently do not have access to. The research done at UMass Amherst is limited to animals such as mice. Mice allow for research involving fertilization and embryogenesis, but research on diseases is limited.

However, Fissore is optimistic about advancing research at UMass Amherst to human stem cell lines.

‘I think there will be a lot more [embryonic stem cell research] since the ban lift ‘hellip; each species has something specific to that species, that’s why it is important to study human stem cells,’ he said.

Joe Stahl and Maggie Freleng can be reached at [email protected].

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