Why Foetal tissue research is important in medicine

On 27 November, a gunman shot dead three people at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA. In a post-arrest interview, the suspect is reported to have said “no more baby parts”.
It really is a matter of perception. The misunderstanding has risen because of a fierce atmosphere that has surrounded US research with foetal tissues since July this year, when an anti-abortion group called the Center for Medical Progress in Irvine, California, released covertly filmed videos in which senior physicians from the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, a non-profit women’s health provider, bluntly and dispassionately discussed their harvesting of foetal organs from abortions for use in research. This gave some people the idea that abortions were carried out just to use foetal parts. The content of the videos is actually an anti-abortion propaganda in the US!

I think experts should tell people outside of labs clearly why foetal tissue research is important. And here is why...

Every month, researchers who buy useful foetal parts receive small test tubes on ice from a company in California. In them are pieces of liver from a human foetuses aborted at between 14 and 19 weeks of pregnancy.

Scientists working in the field carefully grind the liver, centrifuge it and then extract and purify liver- and blood-forming stem cells. They inject the cells into the livers of newborn mice, and allow those mice to mature. The resulting animals are the only ‘humanized’ mice with both functioning human liver and immune cells and, for researchers, they are invaluable in their work on hepatitis B and C, allowing them to probe how the viruses evade the human immune system and cause chronic liver diseases.

Using foetal tissue is not an easy choice, but so far there is no better choice, according to these scientists, who has tried other alternate methods without much success, to make a humanized mouse with other techniques. Many, many biomedical researchers depend on foetal tissue research to really save human lives. And many of them feel they are only doing good to humanity.

Human foetal tissues are used in in these research areas: HIV/AIDS, Developmental Biology, Eye development and disease, Infectious diseases like hepatitis C, type I diabetes, In utero diseases, toxic exposures and congenital (inborn or hereditory) conditions, Foetal tissue repository. Livers from aborted foetuses are also used to probe the impacts of maternal smoking on liver development.

Cell lines derived from aborted foetal tissue have been fairly commonplace in research and medicine since the creation in the 1960s of the WI-38 cell strain, which was derived at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and MRC-5, which came from a Medical Research Council laboratory in London ( Nature 498, 422–426; 2013 ). Viruses multiply readily in these cells, and they are used to manufacture many globally important vaccines, including those against measles, rubella, rabies, chicken pox, shingles and hepatitis A. An estimated 5.8 billion people have received vaccines made with these two cell lines!

In the past 25 years, foetal cell lines have been used in a roster of medical advances, including the production of an important arthritis drug and therapeutic proteins that fight cystic fibrosis and haemophilia.

In some research areas, foetal tissue may, in time, be replaced by other materials and methods: alternative, flexible cell types, including human ES cells and induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells (an immature cell or stem cell capable of giving rise to several different cell types), and organoids, which are lab-created cellular structures that resemble tissue from normal organs.  But there is one area in which, scientists say, foetal tissue is needed by definition: studies of early human development, and why it sometimes goes wrong. Human foetal tissue is likely never going to be replaced in some areas of research, particularly relative to foetal development.

Occasionally, foetal tissue is used for clinical work. Last year, a company called Neuralstem in Germantown, Maryland, in collaboration with scientists at the University of California, San Diego, launched a trial in which stem cells from foetal spinal cord were implanted to treat spinal-cord injuries. In May, researchers in the United Kingdom and Sweden launched a study in which dopaminergic [ related to dopamine - literally, "working on dopamine", dopamine being a common neurotransmitter (it transmit signals across a chemical synapse)] neurons from aborted foetuses are transplanted into the brains of patients with Parkinson’s disease ( Nature 510,195–196; 2014).

This research is done to save human lives from various diseases and not for any other selfish purposes. Supporters of the research argue that foetal tissue is legally obtained (clinics obtain full and informed consent from women choosing to donate foetal remains for research), that it would otherwise be wasted and destroyed, that such work has already led to major medical advances and that, if there were better alternatives, they would turn to them. Moreover, foetal tissue is a flexible, less-differentiated tissue. It grows readily and adapts to new environments, allowing researchers to study basic biology or use it as a tool in a way that can’t be replicated with adult tissue.

Now do you understand why aborted foetal tissues are important in medical research? And that abortions are not undertaken to harvest baby body parts?

Source: http://www.nature.com