And that would be why it's linked to cancer, right?
But it seems that the process already is being manipulated successfully in tissue engineering, for example.
Do you know the status of cloning cells for transplant? And the role of telomerase in cloned cells? Ie., is telomerase activation/deactivation
manipulated?
Do you know what the alternatives are to Geron's technology? Could that be the holdup? Looking for alternatives, to avoid paying intellectual
property and patent rights?
As far as the link to cancer, yes. To an extent, some oncologists (like the one I am working under right now) feel it is the CAUSE of cancer. Perhaps
the enhancer/promoter which initiate the nuclear RNA transcript that eventually translates into telomerase is an oncogene that can be triggered by
certain types of viral infections, radiation exposure (UV), chemical exposure, or other carcinogens. The cells found in a cancerous tumor, as you well
know, are stuck in a cycle of constant karyokinesis and cytokinesis. These cells do not die, easily at least, but can also pretty much kill themselves
to an extent by dividing beyond their nutritional means. This is compensated for when blood vessels re-route themselves to feed the tumor, but were it
not for this, the outer tumor cells would die shortly after their creation due to division because of a lack of nutrition. Thus, if telomerase were
suddenly activated in every cell in your body, or even just one cell subtype, you would experience a period of massive cellular increase (imagine, for
example, the basal cells of your skin doubling in number due to telomerase not allowing the upper layer skin cells to die), followed by the massive
death of cells due to a lack of immediate nutrition.
This process can most definitely by changed in tissue engineering. You can grow up telomerase+ cells in culture containing nutrient broth, but this is
a far cry from introducing telomerase into a living system in which nutrient have to be transported TO the cells.
As far as cloned cells for transplant, I don't believe telomerase is an issue in these. From my understanding, and I am not in biomedical research,
just clinical, the cells that are cloned are simply created by introducing a somatic cell nucleus of the patient into an anucelated egg cell from a
donor, thus producing genomically competent stem cells which can be induced into cardiac tissue, neural tissue, etc. This is what Dr. Suk was doing in
Korea, and sucessfully did with two lines, before falsifying the other 9 lines, due possibly to time/funding constraints or just poor moral
judgement.
As far as Geron, it very well could be that they are trying to avoid having to pay for intellectual rights. A case I've heard of happening several
times in medical corporations is that a company will purposely produce a treatment cheaper or easier than their brand name treatment, that way they
can come off as a company who "care about the common man" by producing a cheap medicine, but the money all goes to the same place. This example I
heard of was in Poland, and probably occurs in the USA, too. Doesn't quite work in social medicine due to the budget constraints, but I could see how
even some less socialized states could fall into this.
~MFP
[edit on 3/2/2006 by bsl4doc]
