Sun, 8 November 2009
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Hamburg, Germany -- Faced with strict German laws banning the use of human embryos, a team of German scientists came up with a radical new "ethical" source for stem cells -- men's testicles.
The scientists believe their breakthrough may offer a whole new range of treatments for diseases like Parkinson's and diabetes and for spinal cord injuries involving use of men's own stem cells to replace damaged or diseased cells in their own bodies.
The researchers from the Universities of Tuebingen and Cologne in Germany, and King's College London, say that routine biopsies of men's testicles could provide a new source of stem cells, which could be as good as embryonic stem cells for researching and developing treatments for a range of serious diseases, but without the ethical and legal problems of embryonic stem cells.
"The generation of human adult germ-line stem cells from testicular biopsies may provide simple and non-controversial access to individual cell-based therapy without the ethical and immunological problems associated with human embryonic stem cells," writes Thomas Skutella, who leads an experimental embryology group at Tuebingen University, in the online edition of Nature.
Stem cells are the new hope for treatment development because they carry the potential of personalized therapy -- using a person's own cells to create stem cells that can then repair and replace damaged tissue, such as in Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's and various forms of cancer.
This way the big problem of immune system rejection is overcome because the implants have the same DNA as the host.
The drawback, however, is that using stem cells from male testes, the treatment would only work on men.
Stem cells from embryos have the potential to become any cell in the body; after all, a whole person grows from a single fertilized egg. But getting stem cells from embryos is fraught with ethical problems since it involves the destruction of embryos. In Germany, stem cell research involving embryos is prohibited by federal law.
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