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Grant to Aid Stem Cell Work at UC Davis
By Dorsey Griffith
Contra Costa Times (Walnut Creek, CA)
09 October 2005
The federal government has awarded $6 million to UC Davis to explore the use of human embryonic and other stem cells in the search for possible treatments for childhood diseases, university officials announced Tuesday.
The money comes with the university's designation as one of two new Centers of Excellence in Translational Human Stem Cell Research. The award, from the National Institutes of Health, is part of a much larger federal commitment to support stem cell research.
Embryonic stem cells have the unique ability to divide indefinitely and can mature into any kind of cell in the body. Researchers hope the cells can be used to regenerate tissue or organs damaged or destroyed by disease or neurological disorders.
Use of embryonic stem cells is controversial because they come from embryos just a few days after fertilization and embryos must be destroyed to be used in the laboratory.
The embryonic stem cells that Davis researchers will use come from one of the federally approved human embryonic stem cell lines. The Bush administration has opposed creation of any new embryonic stem cell lines.
The federal research grant is separate from the state's plan to use money approved by voters last fall for stem cell research. UC Davis also hopes to secure a sizable chunk of that money, estimated at $3 billion.
Alice Tarantal, a professor in pediatrics at the California National Primate Research Center at Davis, said the federal funding will pay for three projects to boost the understanding of stem cell biology. The work will be done in the laboratory using cell culture techniques and nonhuman primate models.
"If you put stem cells into the body of a patient, one of the big questions is, what do they do? Will they contribute to the organ, not only in terms of its structure, but also its function?" she asked. "Will the cell go where you want and do what you want? And once we put them in, how can we monitor what they are doing?"
Specifically, she said, researchers will focus on how to grow cells in sufficient quantities to make their use in disease treatment more feasible. They will try to determine the best methods to assess the safety of potential treatments, and how best to track cells in the body.
One project at Davis will attempt to use early kidney cells to help regenerate a kidney damaged by urinary tract obstruction in children, with the hope of avoiding the need for a kidney transplant or dialysis.
Another project will work to increase the number of cells obtained from umbilical cord blood for use in stem cell transplants. Umbilical cord blood cells are taken from the umbilical cords and placentas of newborns.
Finally, the Davis center will investigate imaging techniques to track transplanted stem cells. Researchers plan to tag cells -- both embryonic and from blood -- and follow them as they travel through the body.
Tarantal acknowledged that it will take a lot of money, time and research before embryonic cell therapies are developed and proclaimed safe for use in people.
"There are huge numbers of questions, and we really don't know what the therapeutic applications are going to be," she said. "It's not going to be a simple process."
Tarantal said the center will create a program to solicit applications from investigators nationwide to contribute to the research effort at the center.
The NIH this week also awarded $16.1 million over four years to fund a national stem cell bank at the WiCell Research Institute in Wisconsin and $3.6 million to Northwestern University, the second Center of Excellence in Translational Human Stem Cell Research, for stem cell investigation in repairing damaged spinal cords.
Last week, the agency awarded grants to four other research centers working on ways to bring stem cell therapies into human clinical practice.
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