Read
Reuters Photojournalism
Our day's top images, in-depth photo essays and offbeat slices of life. See the best of Reuters photography. See more
Sponsored Links
Nobel laureate Yamanaka warns of rogue "stemcell therapies"
Kyoto University Professor Shinya Yamanaka talks with Japan's Prime Minister Yoshihiko Nada by a mobile phone during a news conference in Kyoto, western Japan, in this photo taken by Kyodo October 8, 2012.
Credit: Reuters/Kyodo
HONG KONG |
HONG KONG (Reuters) - Nobel laureate Shinya Yamanaka warned patients on Tuesday about unproven "stem cell therapies" offered at clinics and hospitals in a growing number of countries, saying they were highly risky.
The Internet is full of advertisements touting stem cell cures for just about any disease -- from diabetes, multiple sclerosis, arthritis, eye problems, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's to spinal cord injuries -- in countries such as China, Mexico, India, Turkey and Russia.
Yamanaka, who shared the Nobel Prize for Medicine on Monday with John Gurdon of the Gurdon Institute in Cambridge, Britain, called for caution.
"This type of practice is an enormous problem, it is a threat. Many so-called stem cell therapies are being conducted without any data using animals, preclinical safety checks," said Yamanaka of Kyoto University in Japan.
"Patients should understand that if there are no preclinical data in the efficiency and safety of the procedure that he or she is undergoing ... it could be very dangerous," he told Reuters in a telephone interview.
Yamanaka and Gurdon shared the Nobel Prize for the discovery that adult cells can be transformed back into embryo-like stem cells that may one day regrow tissue in damaged brains, hearts or other organs.
"I hope patients and lay people can understand there are two kinds of stem cell therapies. One is what we are trying to establish. It is solely based on scientific data. We have been conducting preclinical work, experiments with animals, like rats and monkeys," Yamanaka said.
"Only when we confirm the safety and effectiveness of stem cell therapies with animals will we initiate clinical trials using a small number of patients."
Yamanaka, who calls the master stem cells he created "induced pluripotent stem cells" (iPS), hopes to see the first clinical trials soon.
"There is much promising research going on," he said.
(Editing by Nick Macfie)
- Tweet this
- Link this
- Share this
- Digg this
- Reprints
In order to justify giving him the prize instead of many other perhaps more or at least equally worthy scientific work, the Committee and the world hype up the “huge” progress. And the media hyped it up even more out of ignorance about science. In fact, the day like the one Christopher Reeves dreamed of, when a simple injection of stem-cell would cure his paralysis, is extremely far away. In fact, it still isn’t clear if it’s possible.
So at least, he is aware of the mostly political nature of the award and the pitfalls of portraying scientific achievements as “superior” when it is merely more fitting to the political aspirations of scientists at the time.
It’s well known that Nobel Prizes in the Sciences are very political. It just so happens that the political nature is easily explained to lay people this time. The biggest take home for most lay people, is that the choice of the recipients of Nobel Prizes in the Sciences are equally as political as for the Peace Prize, which is almost getting notorious, since more people are mentioning that Hitler was once nominated for the prize. The truth that people in the sciences know, especially for scientists from countries who do not control the committees, the choice is often not awarded to the best scientists.
Follow Reuters