Lanza Defends Stem Cell Paper (Again)

A commenter in this post asked why Bodyhack is still talking about Advanced Cell Technology's beleaguered research published on August 23 in Nature.

Excuse our stubbornness, but many people still don't get that ACT actually did report a significant finding: that it's possible to derive stem cells from an embryo without harming it. It's not surprising that ACT is losing the public relations fight on this one. The company is being attacked by not only anti-abortion activists, but also fellow scientists and politicians who should have been on ACT's side.

In the comments on that same post, some readers say Robert Lanza and his co-authors did not prove what they claimed because they cultured their cells in the presence of other embryonic cells. We've repeatedly disagreed with this. But since this gets pretty arcane, we'll let Lanza answer for himself. Sent in an email this morning:

Our paper tried to answer a very simple question - is it biologically possible to generate embryonic stem cells from a single cell that has been removed from an embryo during PGD? The answer is
"yes." The key is to recognize that embryonic cells are "social" and require the appropriate environmental signals/clues to know what to do.

That being said, __the conditions described in our paper can easily be used in the PGD setting. First, __the isolated cell can be co-cultured with blastomeres from other embryos biopsied during the IVF cycle (there are almost always multiple embryos undergoing PGD biopsy per cycle).

Alternatively, the isolated cell can be co-cultured with the remaining biopsied embryo. Additional experiments in our laboratory clearly show that single-blastomere development and hES cell outgrowth is similar if the biopsied cell is cultured in the same drop with the parent embryo.

In both cases, it is likely that diffusible factors from the embryo assist recovery and growth of the blastomere. Bottom line: you can generate human embryonic stem cells from the single cell that is biopsied from an embryo during PGD.

(emphasis added)