If you want to know about advances in the treatment of spinal cord injury don’t read any British newspaper or ask the BBC

Reading the reports about the new embryonic stem cell trial for spinal cord injury that have been all over the BBC and the British papers today I am struggling to know what all the fuss is about and why in fact it is even news at all.

I’ve come to the conclusion that it is causing such excitement for five main reasons:

1.Our media are obsessed with any story involving embryonic stem cells despite the fact that these entities have not yet provided any treatments for any human disease after more than ten years of hype (By contrast adult and umbilical stem cells have already provided treatments for over 80 diseases – see my Triple Helix review)

2.Because there is ethical controversy in their use (as harvesting them involves the destruction of human embryos) it provides an opportunity for the media to revive the myth that religious zealots are trying to hold back scientific advance and stop millions of people being cured from terrible diseases.

3.The science correspondents writing for our national newspapers seem not to read medical journals any more but simply regurgitate press releases produced by commercial companies (like Geron) who wish to promote their products and improve their public image.

4.Geron have lots of money (they have already spent $170m developing this ‘treatment’) and a very good PR machine.

5.British scientists are worried about research funding in the current economic climate and so are trying to attract public and media attention in the hope of attracting grants so they are trying to pull the wool over the eyes of gullible politicians and members of the public with exaggerated claims.

If you go to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) website which logs current clinical trials you will find there are 3,124 listings of trials involving adult stem cells and 141 involving umbilical stem cells. These therapies are increasingly well established and pose no ethical problems (and so are of little interest to the British media).

By contrast today’s story is of the first clinical trial involving embryonic stem cells after over a decade of breath-holding.

There are no results yet and no scientific papers yet published in any peer-reviewed journals.

Nor will you learn from any UK media outlet today that there have been clinical trials involving (adult) stem cell treatments for spinal cord injury going on for some years now.

This story seems to be in the news simply because Geron have decided to announce to the world that they have started a clinical trial involving a possible future treatment that has not yet (and may well never) actually deliver.

Just over a week ago I blogged about a new advance in stem cell technology - involving a new improved method of producing induced pluri-potent stem cells (iPs) from ethically harvested adult cells - that led to over 1,400 headlines worldwide.

The British press has to my knowledge still not noticed it – presumably because it did not come packaged in easy cut and paste format from a biotechnology company with a financial vested interest.

For those who are interested in reading a more balanced overview of the research currently going on into stem cell treatments for spinal cord injury in different centres around the world - and about the relative merits of the several different kinds of adult and umbilical stem cells that have been used in animal experiments, or are currently being used in human trials - I would recommend, for starters, the following review articles freely available on the internet.

1.Challenges of Stem Cell Therapy for Spinal Cord Injury: Human Embryonic Stem Cells, Endogenous Neural Stem Cells, or Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells?

2.Stem cell-based therapies for spinal cord injury.

3.Stem and progenitor cell therapies: recent progress for spinal cord injury repair

And if you would to know more about all the varied avenues of work in which researchers are involved in trying to develop treatments for spinal cord injury then try typing the words ‘spinal cord injury’ into the search box here.

When I checked there were 304 clinical trials listed – with only one (today’s story) involving embryonic stem cells!

American scientists make new breakthrough in producing embryonic-like stem cells by ethical means but British media doesn’t notice

The NECN headline this week ‘Harvard scientists make huge stem cell discovery’, is one of over 1,400 in the last few days announcing the latest development in the race to produce patient specific stem cells (pictured) without using human embryos. Ethical treatments for diseases like Parkinson’s disease, diabetes and multiple sclerosis are now one tantalising step closer.

But interestingly you will not read about it (yet) in any British newspaper or on any British online news outlet.

The tendency of the British media to sensationalise ‘advances’ in embryo stem cell research whilst ignoring or underplaying more promising ethical research using adult and umbilical stem cells is long-lived.

Ten years ago, after the 1999 Donaldson Report recommended allowing scientists to clone human embryos for stem cell research using somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), CMF branded the research 'unethical and unnecessary' in a Triple Helix editorial and sounded a strong note of caution. We argued that the enthusiasm for this new technology was 'based more on political expediency than wise reflection' and warned that 'the prospect of revolutionary new treatments (would) undoubtedly entice investors to move funds away from other less glamorous, but potentially more promising avenues of research'.

Since 2000 we have witnessed the glorious failure of scientists in Britain and elsewhere to produce patient-specific stem cells from cloned human embryos. Subsequently, the limited availability and dangers of harvesting human eggs for research fuelled the shift to using cytoplasmic animal-human hybrids ('cybrids'). This was supported by a massive propaganda campaign in 2007-8 involving scientists, patient groups, and politicians, and led by Liberal Democrat MP Evan Harris with the willing co-operation of Times Science Correspondent Mark Henderson.

As a result, in an impassioned Observer article in May 2008, Prime Minister Gordon Brown welcomed animal-human hybrids as 'a profound opportunity to save and transform millions of lives' and expressed his commitment to this research as 'an inherently moral endeavour that can save and improve the lives of thousands and over time millions of people'. The measure was supported in a heavily whipped vote as part of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, now the HFE Act.

Ironically, before the new Act had even come into force, the news broke that stem cells from animal-human hybrids were seen as a poor investment and almost certainly wouldn't work. In January 2009, the two leading UK researchers granted licences for the work, Stephen Minger of Kings College London and Lyle Armstrong at Newcastle University Centre for Life, were denied funding by the Medical Research Council.

The British Medical Journal reported that the grant applications had been turned down because the reviewers considered that they were not competitive in the face of the lack of overall funding for medical research in the United Kingdom.

Minger himself admitted that he believed the distribution of research funding should be competitive, based on assessment of scientific value and cost, and noted that induced pluripotent stem cells are cheaper to set up than human-animal hybrid stem cell research. No one it seemed wanted to invest money in the new research, given the low likelihood of it ever yielding results and the emergence of cheaper ethical alternatives.

Less than three weeks later, in a landmark paper in Cloning and Stem Cells, Robert Lanza and colleagues from Advanced Cell Technology, Massachusetts, demonstrated that animal oocytes lack the capacity to fully reprogramme and activate adult human cells, and specifically the pluripotency-associated genes needed for stem cell production. The hybrid embryos from mouse, cow and rabbit eggs looked microscopically normal but were genetically flawed. Journal Editor Sir Ian Wilmut, the British cloning pioneer involved in the 1996 creation of Dolly the sheep, concluded that 'production of patient-specific stem cells by this means would (now) be impracticable'.

Wilmut had himself already abandoned embryonic stem cell research, in favour of iPS, induced pluripotent stem cells (produced ethically by dedifferentiating somatic cells to produce embryonic-like stem cells). Yamanaka and Thomson's seminal work in this area in late 2007 was later dubbed the scientific breakthrough of the year by the magazine Science.

Some scientists had expressed concern that Yamanaka had used virus vectors to transfer the genes which would reprogramme the somatic cells. But on 1 March 2009, in a later twist, a UK and Canadian team succeeded in turning somatic cells into embryonic-like stem cells, without using viruses.

But now, in a further major advance this week, American scientists have gone a step further. Derrick Rossi and colleagues of Children's Hospital Boston and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute have reported in a paper published online by the journal Cell Stem Cell that they have produced induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) from skin cells using modified forms of messenger RNA. The new technique appears to be one hundred times more efficient than that initially pioneered by Yamanaka.

Other experts have praised the work. Marius Wernig, an iPS researcher at Stanford University called the process ‘highly efficient’ and added that if the initial promise is borne out this ‘would be the first practical method for generating iPS cells that could be used for transplant therapies’. He added, ‘If it turns out to be a very efficient way of generating iPS cells without any genetic modification, then it would be a big advance’.

Kathrin Plath of the University of California, Los Angeles, called the work ‘very impressive’ and said it appears to show the best approach so far for making such cells for transplant tissue.

As I mentioned at the start of this article, there are currently over 1,400 articles on the web about this new breakthrough but not one I can find in a British newspaper. Instead the British press has been highlighting the story of a doctor struck off by the GMC for the unethical use of bogus stem cell treatments.

I suspect that when this new advance is finally reported it will be underplayed and made without any reference to Britain’s ten years of blind alley investment in embryonic stem cell research.

Perhaps the last word belongs to leading US stem cell scientist James Sherley: 'For those trained in the science, this is not news, but instead a completed fate that was known from the beginning' – a timely reminder that in good science the end does not justify the means (Romans 3:8).

The government needs to invest more in cord blood

More than two years ago CMF welcomed a new bill which encouraged the donation at childbirth of umbilical cord blood and its storage for public use. It also called on the government to invest more actively in developing the NHS cord stem cell bank.

MP David Burrowes' Umbilical Cord Blood (Donation) Bill aimed to increase awareness of the value of umbilical cord blood in treating diseases and to promote further research for new treatment methods using cord blood stem cells. The Bill required doctors to inform all parents of the benefits of collection and storage of cord blood, and sought to promote collection from specific shortage groups, such as minority ones including mixed race families and families where there was a history of cord blood treatable diseases.

Sadly the bill was not granted parliamentary time to progress. The government instead was at the time pursuing its agenda of cytoplasmic animal human hybrid (cybrid) research through the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill – a bill that is now law. Very shortly after this bill was passed new research suggested that this avenue of research was very unlikely ever to be successful – and at the time I predicted animal human hybrid research would become a ‘farcical footnote in history’.

Today scientists reported exciting new developments suggesting that cord blood may well hold the answer for people with leukemia requiring bone marrow transplants and quite possibly also for those suffering from other similar diseases. The BBC website carried the story of Natalie Salama-Levy who is unable to donate cord blood from her baby due at the Royal Free Hospital in London next month because the hospital lacks the facilities to collect and store it. Ironically Natalie's husband Lionel is the chair of 'The cord blood charity’ and was inspired to become involved following the death of a close friend from leukaemia.

In 2008 only three NHS hospitals were collecting cord blood. It seems that the situation has not improved much since. Cord blood has already cured around 10,000 people around the world, but despite this our own UK cord blood banking facilities are woefully behind the times. We should instead be making this simple and uncontroversial technology much more readily accessible.

The Anthony Nolan Trust said today that 50,000 cord bloods would meet the UK's need for transplant and research purposes but the NHS has collected only 13,000 cords over 13 years and of these only 279 have been suitable for transplant.

In 2006 the number of live births in England and Wales reached 669,601 compared with 645,835 in 2005. The number of live births has been increasing every year since 2001. If the government had been more active in encouraging the storage of cord blood in the last five years, rather than over-hyping hopes about hybrid embryonic stem cells, we could potentially have had millions of samples of stem cells banked for treatment by now. Instead they intend to invest only £10 million to increase the size of the bank to 20,000 stored units by 2013.