14 DAY TRIAL // It is clear that stem cells research could boom the medical advance.
Currently stem cells are extracted from human embryos, but there is a major ethical issue around this theme: the stem cells' extraction destroys the embryos. In US, this type of research does not receive federal funds.
Ian Wilmut, famous for cloning Dolly the sheep in 1996, is calling on researchers to use the injected human DNA into animal egg cells as a workaround for ethical and legal issues. Researchers could take a DNA-packed nucleus from a diseased person's cell and put it into an animal egg with removed nucleus.
In about 12 % of the cases, this will generate a clump of human embryonic stem cells. When the clump has grown enough, experimental drugs can be tested on the cells and no human embryo is harmed.
"I think that this is critical set of experiments that should go forward," told LiveScience Kevin Eggan, an embryonic stem cell researcher at Harvard University.
"The proposed process would be an improvement over the current approach-testing experimental drugs on mice. These experiments can take years to complete. Embryonic stem cells, however, need only a few days to grow up to a drug-testable point. In a single year thousands of compounds could be screened in the same time and at the same cost it takes to test a "handful" of drugs with mice experiments." wrote Wilmut.
"In addition to faster drug testing, the process could have several other benefits. Medical researchers could get better results by testing drugs on human tissue-rather than a mouse's-and avoid the expensive and challenging procedure of extracting eggs from women." added Wilmut.
"Although barriers to producing embryos and embryonic stem cells (with this process) could be large, so too are the lessons that could be learned."