[extropy-chat] Lab Creates Babies As Stem-Cell Donors (fwd from bpaatsch at bigpond.net.au)

Thu May 6 02:31:46 UTC 2004

Lab Creates Babies As Stem-Cell Donors
May 4, 11:00 PM (ET)
By LINDSEY TANNER 

The made-to-order infants, from different families, were screened and
selected when they were still embryos to make sure they would be
compatible donors. Their siblings suffered from leukemia or a rare and
potentially lethal anemia. 

This is the first time embryo tissue-typing has been done for common
disorders like leukemia that are not inherited, and the results suggest
that many more children than previously thought could benefit from 
the technology, said Dr. Anver Kuliev, a Chicago doctor who
participated in the research. 

"This technology has wide implications in medical practice," Kuliev
said Tuesday at a news conference. 

The Chicago doctors said the healthy embryos that were not matches
were frozen for potential future use. But some ethicists said such
perfectly healthy embryos could end up being discarded. 

"This was a search-and-destroy mission," said Richard Doerflinger of
the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The chosen embryos "were
allowed to be born so they could donate tissue to benefit someone else." 

Valparaiso University professor Gilbert Meilaender, a member of the 
President's Council on Bioethics, called the practice "morally
troubling." 

The council recently called for increased scrutiny of the largely
unregulated U.S. infertility industry. 

The cases involved prenatal tests called pre-implantation HLA testing,
pioneered at Chicago's Reproductive Genetics Institute. 

The tests are an offshoot of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, which
has been done for more than 1,000 couples worldwide to weed out
test-tube embryos with genetic diseases such as Down syndrome,
or, more recently, for sex selection. 

The institute's doctors made headlines four years ago after performing
embryo tissue typing plus genetic disease screening for a Colorado
couple who wanted to create another baby to save their daughter, 
who had a rare inherited disease called Fanconi anemia. The resulting
baby boy, Adam Nash, donated bone marrow in an operation doctors
said was a success. 

Since then, embryo tissue typing with genetic disease testing has
been performed more than three dozen times worldwide, with most
of the cases done at the Chicago institute, Kuliev said. 

Kuliev said the latest cases are the first instances in which embryos
were tissue-typed but not screened genetically for diseases. 

The cases, reported in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical
Association, involved nine couples who submitted embryos that
underwent tissue-typing tests during 2002 and 2003. Five had infants
considered suitable donors. 

So far, stem cells from the umbilical cord blood of one infant have been
donated to an ailing sibling, Kuliev said. He called the operation a
success but said the older child will need continued monitoring to be
sure. 

Another baby was born last June to an English couple who traveled to
Chicago after British fertility authorities denied them permission to
undergo the procedure in England, said Dr. Mohammed Taranissi, a
London doctor who co-authored the JAMA report. The couple's older
child has Diamond-Blackfan anemia, a rare blood ailment that can
lead to leukemia. Taranissi said a transplant from the baby boy's
umbilical cord blood is scheduled soon. 

Kuliev said the institute has done HLA embryo testing alone for more
than a dozen other couples and demand is growing. 

More than 13,000 U.S. residents are diagnosed yearly with one of
the leukemias involved in the research - acute myeloid leukemia and
acute lymphoid leukemia, the most common childhood leukemia. 

Taranissi disagreed with ethicists concerned about discarding
disease-free embryos. He noted that it often happens with in vitro
fertilization, when doctors frequently create more test-tube embryos
than are needed. 

With tissue-typing embryos, "you're doing this as a lifesaving
procedure most of the time," Taranissi said. 

For years, families with sick children have conceived babies without
costly test-tube procedures, taking a 1-in-4 chance that the child
will be a match for the ailing sibling, said University of Wisconsin
medical ethicist Norman Fost, who wrote a JAMA editorial. 

Some have had abortions when standard prenatal testing showed
the child would not be a suitable donor, he said. 

The new procedure, he noted, does not involve abortion and poses
no known risks to the embryos. Furthermore, parents seeking
donor babies typically are well-intentioned and love the donor
children, Fost said. 

"Of all the reasons people have babies, this would seem to be a
wonderful reason. Most reasons are either mindless sex or selfish
reasons," he said. 

--- 
On the Net: 
JAMA: http://jama.ama-assn.org 
American Society for Reproductive Medicine: http://www.asrm.org 
Presidents' Bioethics Council: http://www.bioethics.gov
--------------------

Brett Paatsch

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