Regenerative medicine has come a long way, baby
The field of regenerative medicine had a shaky start. In 2002, when news spread about the first cloned animal, Dolly the sheep, a raucous debate ensued. Scary headlines and organized opposition groups put pressure on government leaders, who responded by tightening restrictions on this type of research.
Fast forward to today, and regenerative medicine, which focuses on making unhealthy tissues and organs healthy again, is rewriting the code to healing many disorders, though it’s still young enough to be considered nascent. What started as one of the most controversial areas in medicine is now promising to transform it.
Progress in the lab has addressed previous concerns. Back in the early 2000s, some of the most fervent controversy centered around somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), the process used by scientists to produce Dolly. There was fear that this technique could be used in humans, with possibly adverse effects, considering the many medical problems of the animals who had been cloned.
But today, scientists have discovered better approaches with fewer risks. Pioneers in the field are embracing new possibilities for cellular reprogramming, 3D organ printing, AI collaboration, and even growing organs in space. It could bring a new era of personalized medicine for longer, healthier lives - while potentially sparking new controversies.
Engineering tissues from amniotic fluids
Work in regenerative medicine seeks to reverse damage to organs and tissues by culling, modifying and replacing cells in the human body. Scientists in this field reach deep into the mechanisms of diseases and the breakdowns of cells, the little workhorses that perform all life-giving processes. If cells can’t do their jobs, they take whole organs and systems down with them. Regenerative medicine seeks to harness the power of healthy cells derived from stem cells to do the work that can literally restore patients to a state of health—by giving them healthy, functioning tissues and organs.
Modern-day regenerative medicine takes its origin from the 1998 isolation of human embryonic stem cells, first achieved by John Gearhart at Johns Hopkins University. Gearhart isolated the pluripotent cells that can differentiate into virtually every kind of cell in the human body. There was a raging controversy about the use of these cells in research because at that time they came exclusively from early-stage embryos or fetal tissue.
Back then, the highly controversial SCNT cells were the only way to produce genetically matched stem cells to treat patients. Since then, the picture has changed radically because other sources of highly versatile stem cells have been developed. Today, scientists can derive stem cells from amniotic fluid or reprogram patients’ skin cells back to an immature state, so they can differentiate into whatever types of cells the patient needs.
In the context of medical history, the field of regenerative medicine is progressing at a dizzying speed. But for those living with aggressive or chronic illnesses, it can seem that the wheels of medical progress grind slowly.
The ethical debate has been dialed back and, in the last few decades, the field has produced important innovations, spurring the development of whole new FDA processes and categories, says Anthony Atala, a bioengineer and director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine. Atala and a large team of researchers have pioneered many of the first applications of 3D printed tissues and organs using cells developed from patients or those obtained from amniotic fluid or placentas.
His lab, considered to be the largest devoted to translational regenerative medicine, is currently working with 40 different engineered human tissues. Sixteen of them have been transplanted into patients. That includes skin, bladders, urethras, muscles, kidneys and vaginal organs, to name just a few.
These achievements are made possible by converging disciplines and technologies, such as cell therapies, bioengineering, gene editing, nanotechnology and 3D printing, to create living tissues and organs for human transplants. Atala is currently overseeing clinical trials to test the safety of tissues and organs engineered in the Wake Forest lab, a significant step toward FDA approval.
In the context of medical history, the field of regenerative medicine is progressing at a dizzying speed. But for those living with aggressive or chronic illnesses, it can seem that the wheels of medical progress grind slowly.
“It’s never fast enough,” Atala says. “We want to get new treatments into the clinic faster, but the reality is that you have to dot all your i’s and cross all your t’s—and rightly so, for the sake of patient safety. People want predictions, but you can never predict how much work it will take to go from conceptualization to utilization.”
As a surgeon, he also treats patients and is able to follow transplant recipients. “At the end of the day, the goal is to get these technologies into patients, and working with the patients is a very rewarding experience,” he says. Will the 3D printed organs ever outrun the shortage of donated organs? “That’s the hope,” Atala says, “but this technology won’t eliminate the need for them in our lifetime.”
New methods are out of this world
Jeanne Loring, another pioneer in the field and director of the Center for Regenerative Medicine at Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, says that investment in regenerative medicine is not only paying off, but is leading to truly personalized medicine, one of the holy grails of modern science.
This is because a patient’s own skin cells can be reprogrammed to become replacements for various malfunctioning cells causing incurable diseases, such as diabetes, heart disease, macular degeneration and Parkinson’s. If the cells are obtained from a source other than the patient, they can be rejected by the immune system. This means that patients need lifelong immunosuppression, which isn’t ideal. “With Covid,” says Loring, “I became acutely aware of the dangers of immunosuppression.” Using the patient’s own cells eliminates that problem.
Microgravity conditions make it easier for the cells to form three-dimensional structures, which could more easily lead to the growing of whole organs. In fact, Loring's own cells have been sent to the ISS for study.
Loring has a special interest in neurons, or brain cells that can be developed by manipulating cells found in the skin. She is looking to eventually treat Parkinson’s disease using them. The manipulated cells produce dopamine, the critical hormone or neurotransmitter lacking in the brains of patients. A company she founded plans to start a Phase I clinical trial using cell therapies for Parkinson’s soon, she says.
This is the culmination of many years of basic research on her part, some of it on her own cells. In 2007, Loring had her own cells reprogrammed, so there’s a cell line that carries her DNA. “They’re just like embryonic stem cells, but personal,” she said.
Loring has another special interest—sending immature cells into space to be studied at the International Space Station. There, microgravity conditions make it easier for the cells to form three-dimensional structures, which could more easily lead to the growing of whole organs. In fact, her own cells have been sent to the ISS for study. “My colleagues and I have completed four missions at the space station,” she says. “The last cells came down last August. They were my own cells reprogrammed into pluripotent cells in 2009. No one else can say that,” she adds.
Future controversies and tipping points
Although the original SCNT debate has calmed down, more controversies may arise, Loring thinks.
One of them could concern growing synthetic embryos. The embryos are ultimately derived from embryonic stem cells, and it’s not clear to what stage these embryos can or will be grown in an artificial uterus—another recent invention. The science, so far done only in animals, is still new and has not been widely publicized but, eventually, “People will notice the production of synthetic embryos and growing them in an artificial uterus,” Loring says. It’s likely to incite many of the same reactions as the use of embryonic stem cells.
Bernard Siegel, the founder and director of the Regenerative Medicine Foundation and executive director of the newly formed Healthspan Action Coalition (HSAC), believes that stem cell science is rapidly approaching tipping point and changing all of medical science. (For disclosure, I do consulting work for HSAC). Siegel says that regenerative medicine has become a new pillar of medicine that has recently been fast-tracked by new technology.
Artificial intelligence is speeding up discoveries and the convergence of key disciplines, as demonstrated in Atala’s lab, which is creating complex new medical products that replace the body’s natural parts. Just as importantly, those parts are genetically matched and pose no risk of rejection.
These new technologies must be regulated, which can be a challenge, Siegel notes. “Cell therapies represent a challenge to the existing regulatory structure, including payment, reimbursement and infrastructure issues that 20 years ago, didn’t exist.” Now the FDA and other agencies are faced with this revolution, and they’re just beginning to adapt.
Siegel cited the 2021 FDA Modernization Act as a major step. The Act allows drug developers to use alternatives to animal testing in investigating the safety and efficacy of new compounds, loosening the agency’s requirement for extensive animal testing before a new drug can move into clinical trials. The Act is a recognition of the profound effect that cultured human cells are having on research. Being able to test drugs using actual human cells promises to be far safer and more accurate in predicting how they will act in the human body, and could accelerate drug development.
Siegel, a longtime veteran and founding father of several health advocacy organizations, believes this work helped bring cell therapies to people sooner rather than later. His new focus, through the HSAC, is to leverage regenerative medicine into extending not just the lifespan but the worldwide human healthspan, the period of life lived with health and vigor. “When you look at the HSAC as a tree,” asks Siegel, “what are the roots of that tree? Stem cell science and the huge ecosystem it has created.” The study of human aging is another root to the tree that has potential to lengthen healthspans.
The revolutionary science underlying the extension of the healthspan needs to be available to the whole world, Siegel says. “We need to take all these roots and come up with a way to improve the life of all mankind,” he says. “Everyone should be able to take advantage of this promising new world.”
Your Privacy vs. the Public's Health: High-Tech Tracking to Fight COVID-19 Evokes Orwell
The COVID-19 pandemic has placed public health and personal privacy on a collision course, as smartphone technology has completely rewritten the book on contact tracing.
It's not surprising that an autocratic regime like China would adopt such measures, but democracies such as Israel have taken a similar path.
The gold standard – patient interviews and detective work – had been in place for more than a century. It's been all but replaced by GPS data in smartphones, which allows contact tracing to occur not only virtually in real time, but with vastly more precision.
China has gone the furthest in using such tech to monitor and prevent the spread of the coronavirus. It developed an app called Health Code to determine which of its citizens are infected or at risk of becoming infected. It has assigned each individual a color code – red, yellow or green – and restricts their movement depending on their assignment. It has also leveraged its millions of public video cameras in conjunction with facial recognition tech to identify people in public who are not wearing masks.
It's not surprising that an autocratic regime like China would adopt such measures, but democracies such as Israel have taken a similar path. The national security agency Shin Bet this week began analyzing all personal cellphone data under emergency measures approved by the government. It texts individuals when it's determined they had been in contact with someone who had the coronavirus. In Spain and China, police have sent drones aloft searching for people violating stay-at-home orders. Commands to disperse can be issued through audio systems built into the aircraft. In the U.S., efforts are underway to lift federal restrictions on drones so that police can use them to prevent people from gathering.
The chief executive of a drone manufacturer in the U.S. aptly summed up the situation in an interview with the Financial Times: "It seems a little Orwellian, but this could save lives."
Epidemics and how they're surveilled often pose thorny dilemmas, according to Craig Klugman, a bioethicist and professor of health sciences at DePaul University in Chicago. "There's always a moral issue to contact tracing," he said, adding that the issue doesn't change by nation, only in the way it's resolved.
"Once certain privacy barriers have been breached, it can be difficult to roll them back again."
In China, there's little to no expectation for privacy, so their decision to take the most extreme measures makes sense to Klugman. "In China, the community comes first. In the U.S., individual rights come first," he said.
As the U.S. has scrambled to develop testing kits and manufacture ventilators to identify potential patients and treat them, individual rights have mostly not received any scrutiny. However, that could change in the coming weeks.
The American approach is also leaning toward using smartphone apps, but in a way that may preserve the privacy of users. Researchers at MIT have released a prototype known as Private Kit: Safe Paths. Patients diagnosed with the coronavirus can use the app to disclose their location trail for the prior 28 days to other users without releasing their specific identity. They also have the option of sharing the data with public health officials. But such an app would only be effective if there is a significant number of users.
Singapore is offering a similar app to its citizens known as TraceTogether, which uses both GPS and Bluetooth pings among users to trace potential encounters. It's being offered on a voluntary basis.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the leading nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world, said it is monitoring how these apps are developed and deployed. "Governments around the world are demanding new dragnet location surveillance powers to contain the COVID-19 outbreak," it said in a statement. "But before the public allows their governments to implement such systems, governments must explain to the public how these systems would be effective in stopping the spread of COVID-19. There's no questioning the need for far-reaching public health measures to meet this urgent challenge, but those measures must be scientifically rigorous, and based on the expertise of public health professionals."
Andrew Geronimo, director of the intellectual property venture clinic at the Case Western University School of Law, said that the U.S. government is currently in talks with Facebook, Google and other tech companies about using deidentified location data from smartphones to better monitor the progress of the outbreak. He was hesitant to endorse such a step.
"These companies may say that all of this data is anonymized," he said, "but studies have shown that it is difficult to fully anonymize data sets that contain so much information about us."
Beyond the technical issues, social attitudes may mount another challenge. Epic events such as 9/11 tend to loosen vigilance toward protecting privacy, according to Klugman and Geronimo. And as more people are sickened and hospitalized in the U.S. with COVID-19, Klugman believes more Americans will be willing to allow themselves to be tracked. "If that happens, there needs to be a time limitation," he said.
However, even if time limits are put in place, Geronimo believes it would lead to an even greater rollback of privacy during the next crisis.
"Once certain privacy barriers have been breached, it can be difficult to roll them back again," he warned. "And the prior incidents could always be used as a precedent – or as proof of concept."
Stem Cell Therapy for COVID-19 Is Gaining Steam in China, But Some Skeptical Scientists Urge Caution
Over the past two months, China's frantic search for an effective COVID-19 treatment has seen doctors trying everything from influenza drugs to traditional herbal remedies and even acupuncture, in a bid to help patients suffering from coronavirus-induced pneumonia.
"This treatment is particularly aimed at older patients who are seriously ill. These kinds of patients are in the danger zone."
Since mid February, one approach that has gained increasing traction is stem cell therapies, treatments that have often been viewed as a potential panacea by desperate patients suffering from degenerative incurable conditions ranging from Parkinson's to ALS. In many of these diseases, reality has yet to match the hype.
In COVID-19, there are hopes it might, though some experts are warning not to count on it. At Beijing's YouAn Hospital, doctors have been treating patients at various stages of the illness with intravenous infusions of so-called mesenchymal stem cells taken from umbilical cord tissue, as part of an ongoing clinical trial since January 21. The outcomes of the initial seven patients – published last month – appeared promising and the trial has since been expanded to 31 patients according to Dr. Kunlin Jin, a researcher at University of North Texas Health Science Center who is collaborating with the doctors in Beijing.
"Sixteen of these patients had mild symptoms, eight are severe, and seven are critically severe," Jin told leapsmag. "But all patients have shown improvements in lung function following the treatment, based on CT scans -- most of them in the first three days and seven have now been completely discharged from hospital. This treatment is particularly aimed at older patients who are seriously ill. These kinds of patients are in the danger zone; it's essential that they receive treatment, but right now we have nothing for most of them. No drugs or anything."
The apparent success of the very small Beijing trial has since led to a nationwide initiative to fast-track stem cell therapies for COVID-19. Across China, there are currently 36 clinical trials intending to use mesenchymal stem cells to treat COVID-19 patients that are either in the planning or recruiting phases. The Chinese Medical Association has now issued guidelines to standardize stem cell treatment for COVID-19, while Zhang Xinmin, an official in China's Ministry of Science and Technology, revealed in a press conference last week that a stem cell-based drug has been approved for clinical trials.
The thinking behind why stem cells could be a fast-acting and effective treatment is due to the nature of COVID-19. The thousands of fatalities worldwide are not from the virus directly, but from a dysfunctional immune response to the infection. Patients die because their respiratory systems become overwhelmed by a storm of inflammatory molecules called cytokines, causing lung damage and failure. However, studies in mice have long shown that stem cells have anti-inflammatory properties with the ability to switch off such cytokine storms, reducing such virus-induced lung injuries.
"There has been an enormous amount of hype about these cells, and there is scant scientific evidence that they have any therapeutic effect in any situation. "
"The therapy can inhibit the overactivation of the immune system and promote repair by improving the pulmonary microenvironment and improve lung function," explained Wei Hou, one of the doctors conducting the trial at YouAn Hospital.
However not everyone is convinced, citing the small number of patients treated to date, and potential risks from such therapy. "We just don't know enough to believe that stem cells might be helpful with COVID-19," said Paul Knoepfler, professor of cell biology at UC Davis. "The new stem cell studies are too small and lack controls, making it impossible to come to any solid conclusions. The chance of benefit is low based on the little we know so far and there are going to be risks that are hard to pin down. For instance, what if a stem cell infusion impairs some kind of needed immune response?"
Other scientists are even more skeptical. "I am concerned about all treatments that use mesenchymal stem cells," warned Jeanne Loring, the Director of the Center for Regenerative Medicine at Scripps Research in La Jolla, Calif. "There has been an enormous amount of hype about these cells, and there is scant scientific evidence that they have any therapeutic effect in any situation. Typically, these treatments are offered to people who have diseases without cures. I'm certain that there will be evidence-based treatments for COVID19, but I understand that they are not yet available, people are desperate, and they will try anything. I hope the sick are not taken advantage of because of their desperation."
Despite such concerns, the steadily rising death toll from COVID-19 means other nations are preparing to proceed with their own clinical trials of mesenchymal stem cells. Jin said he has been contacted by researchers and clinicians around the world seeking information on how to conduct their own trials, with the University of Cambridge's Stem Cell Institute in the U.K. reportedly looking to initiate a trial.
The scale of the global emergency has seen governments repeatedly calling on the corporate world to invest in the search for a cure, and the Australian company Mesoblast – a global leader in cell-based therapies for a range of diseases – are expecting to receive the green light to initiate clinical trials of their own stem cell based product against COVID-19.
"We're talking to at least three major governments," said Silviu Itescu, CEO and Managing Director of Mesoblast. "We are working with groups in Australia, the U.S. and the U.K., and I expect there'll be trials starting imminently in all those jurisdictions."
Itescu is bullish that the therapy has a good chance of proving effective, as it recently successfully completed Phase III trials for severe steroid-refractory acute graft versus host disease (GVHD) – a condition which leads to a very similar disease profile to COVID-19.
"The exact same cytokine profile is occurring in the lungs of COVID-19 infected patients as in GVHD which is destructive to the local lung environment," he said. "If our cells are able to target that in GVHD, they ought to be able to switch off the cytokine response in COVID lung disease as well."
"What we should be focusing on now is not the possible boost to the stem cell field, but rather doing rigorous science to test whether stem cells can help COVID-19 patients."
Jin is hopeful that if the imminent trials yield successful results, the U.S. FDA could fast-track mesenchymal stem cells as an approved emergency therapy for COVID-19. However, Knoepfler cautions that there is a need for far more concrete and widespread proof of the benefit before regulatory bodies start ushering through the green light.
"What we should be focusing on now is not the possible boost to the stem cell field, but rather doing rigorous science to test whether stem cells can help COVID-19 patients," he said. "During a pandemic, it's reasonable to do some testing of unproven interventions like stem cells in small studies, but results from them should be discussed in a sober, conservative manner until there is more evidence."