Dolly the Sheep creator hails new research opportunities

THE creator of Dolly the sheep has predicted that treatments using stem cells could become as common as antibiotics.

Professor Ian Wilmut, director of the Scottish Centre for Regenerative Medicine at Edinburgh University, said the first of these revolutionary therapies is expected to be available in around a decade and will develop rapidly over the coming years.

His comments come in the wake of the decision by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) to allow British scientists to create human-animal embryos for research, which Wilmut described as an "important opportunity" in the search for new treatments for diseases such as Alzheimer's.

Stem cells are primal cells at an early stage of development. Scientists hope to use their properties to study diseases and to develop "repair" kits for the body by enabling healthy tissue to be grown.

Wilmut pointed out that researchers around the world were already considering the use of stem cells to repair corneas, bones and specific cases of spinal cord injury.

"New therapies are just the same as medicines, they have to be tested and shown to be effective and safe," he said. "So it will be a small number of cases and a small number of treatments first, which will grow over the years and the decades.

"If you look back to when, for example, antibiotics first came along, there was a small number of them, but progressively they became more and more effective and now we take them for granted."

Applications from two groups - at King's College, London, and Newcastle University - to carry out research using hybrid human-animal embryos will be considered by the HFEA. If successful, it will allow scientists to merge human cells with animal eggs in the hope of extracting valuable embryonic stem cells.

Wilmut, who is also considering asking for permission to create hybrid embryos, said this process could be vital in providing lines of stem cells to study inherited illnesses.

"If it is an inherited disease but you don't know the mutation which is causing the disease, then cloning is an important potential way to get cells that you can study these diseases in," he said. "Motor neurone disease obviously affects some of the nerves in the spine, but there is no way you can recover them (nerves) from a patient when they first become ill.

"If we took genetic information from a person who has an inherited disease and put that into an egg, then got an embryo and stem cells, those stem cells would also have the ability to become nerves equivalent to the patients'.

"What we would want to know is the difference between their nerves and regular healthy nerves early in life."

Wilmut said these stem cells could also be used as an improved "screening tool" in the laboratory for potential treatments.

"If we could have nerves in the dish which show that change, then people with the right sort of technology would be able to literally test thousands of compounds every year," he said. "That is probably 1000 times faster than anything that can be done in any other way at the present time."

A major advantage of using human-animal embryos is to overcome a shortage of human eggs for research. At present, scientists rely on human eggs left over from fertility treatment. A spokeswoman for Newcastle University, said it hoped to use a "ready supply" of cow eggs in the research which is being led by Dr Lyle Armstrong.

"What we want to do is develop the stem cells lines," she said. "This is the very basic science and we're in the position where we are asking to use animal eggs because we can't get a good supply of human eggs."

But the HFEA approval has sparked major controversy. While embryos have to be destroyed after 14 days and cannot be implanted into the womb, opponents argue it is wrong to blur the distinction between humans and animals and to create embryos destined to be destroyed.

Dr Calum MacKellar, director of research at the Scottish Council on Human Bioethics, questioned whether the decision to allow such research to go ahead should have been taken by the fertility regulator, which he described as an "arm's length" body.

"These kind of very important decisions should be left to the UK parliament, so that a democratic process can be undertaken in which there is discussion on all sides," he said.