Medical school researchers pioneer new cloning process
By Kristin Snyder
Old Gold and Black Reporter

The researchers in the School of Medicine’s department of physiology and pharmacology have recently explored a new alternative to traditional stem cell research.

According to Kent Vrana, an associate professor in the department, the process, parthenogenesis, typically involves “tricking” a female egg into thinking it has been fertilized. Unlike an embryo, it will develop into a parthenote– a non-viable, non-fertilized embryo in mammals.

The process does not require the union of a male and female organism or a copy of the cell’s DNA; therefore, a human fetus is not developed.

Vrana and partner Kathleen Grant, a professor in the department, have been conducting extensive research on alcoholism in monkeys in order to better understand the disease in humans.

Grant is “one of the world’s experts in modeling human alcoholism in monkeys,” Vrana said.

The primary goal in the research is “to understand complex human diseases using non-human models. Along the way we have found new things like partheno-genesis, which may be helpful for humans,” Vrana said.

However, federal law prohibits the Medical Center from using federal money to do the stem cell research in humans.

The new technique may provide an alternative to the controversial development of viable embryos, only to destroy them for stem cell research. However, a lot of controversy will remain.

“There is no question that there are still ethical concerns,” Vrana said. “A lot of people will have difficulty, and I respect that.”

According to Vrana, the new process utilizes therapeutic cloning, different from reproductive cloning. Therapeutic cloning deals only with forming cloned cells in test tubes in order to provide valuable tools for curing disease.

Under normal circumstances, this technique would form a human fetus if implanted in a woman’s uterus. However, according to Vrana, with the partheno-genesis process, the cell will only develop into a parthenote and not a human fetus.

On Nov. 28 Dr. Jose Cibelli, the vice president for research of Advanced Cell Technology, gave a presentation at the Medical Center concerning the use of cloning for research.

He spoke to doctors and medical-center workers about the benefits of cloned animals to be applied to human medical research. However, he emphasized that it is too early, and there isn’t enough information to begin reproductive cloning in humans.

“Unfortunately, some people who want to clone humans don’t look at the animals,” said Cibelli in a Nov. 29 Winston-Salem Journal article. “I believe this data is useful and should be taken into consideration before going ahead with human trials.”

Researchers at the Worcester biotechnology company announced Nov. 25 that they had grown a six-cell human embryo.

Although the cell did not continue to develop or produce stem cells, it spawned a separate experiment directly testing stem cells. Rather than cloning, researchers used the partheno-genesis technique to copy the egg’s genetic material. The experiment also failed to produce stem cells.

Some experts see the results of the experiments as a tremendous step for the field, while others disagree, condemning the experiments for not producing fully formed embryos or stem cells.

“All this does is provide support for the opposition of cloning,” said Thomas Okarma, the president of the Geron biotechnology company, in a Dec.2 Atlanta Journal Constitution article.

President George W. Bush has denounced the work. The Senate is being pushed to pass legislation before the Christmas recess that would prohibit further work in human cloning. Bush said Aug. 9 that the government would only pay for certain stem cell experiments, while all other research in therapeutic cloning can only be funded for within private companies, such as the Advanced Cell Technology.

“It has taken us two years to get our team together, our equipment, our space,” Grant said of his research.

“I think it is a program that will continue indefinitely.”