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The Edinburgh-based scientist who created Dolly the sheep has been given permission to use stem cells from cloned human embryos to study motor neurone disease, which kills about 1,200 people in the UK every year.
The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority granted a licence to Professor Ian Wilmut and Dr Paul de Sousa from the Roslin Institute to work with Professor Christopher Shaw of King's College London to generate embryonic stem cells, which can potentially develop into any cell in the body.
The researchers will remove the nucleus from a skin or blood cell donated by someone with the disease, and insert it into an unfertilised egg whose own nucleus has been removed. (Eggs are donated by women undergoing fertility treatment.)
This "nuclear replacement" procedure is similar to the one used to create Dolly, the cloned sheep that caused a worldwide sensation when her birth was announced eight years ago.
The eggs will then be stimulated to grow into early embryos, smaller than a pinhead, and stem cells extracted from them. If the scientists can turn these embryonic stem cells into motor neurones nerves that control movement -- in a laboratory culture, they will have a unique opportunity to discover what causes the neural degeneration.
"This is not reproductive cloning in any way," said Prof Wilmut. "The eggs we use will not be allowed to grow beyond 14 days. Once the stem cells are removed for cell culture the remaining cells will be destroyed.
The embryonic stem cells that we will derive in this will only be used for research into motor neurone disease."
The researchers said this technique could accelerate the discovery of drugs to block the disease, for which there is no cure.
The disease causes severe disability from the outset, and death usually follows within three to five years. Hundreds of thousands of drug candidates could be screened within a year for about £100,000, according to the Roslin Institute, whereas it took nearly two years and Min to screen just one drug in patients with the disease.
Prof Wilmut said he hoped to swap information with colleagues at Newcastle University, who were last year granted the first UK licence for therapeutic cloning of human embryos.
"This is potentially a big step forward for motor neurone disease research," said Prof Shaw. "We have spent 20 years looking for genes that cause the disease, and to date we have come up with just one gene."
Angela McNab, chief executive of the HFEA, said its role was to ensure that research on human embryos was carried out only when shown to be necessary under strictly defined statutory guidelines.
"We recognise that motor neurone disease is a serious congenital condition," she said. "Following careful review of the medical, scientific and legal aspects of this application, we felt it was appropriate to grant the Roslin Institute a one-year licence for this research into the disease."
The HFEA's decision to approve the technique was greeted with applause by medical and patients' representatives, but condemned by anti-abortion groups.
The Society for the Protection of Unborn Children said: "Any licence to clone and kill strikes at the very heart of our society's basic rule for living together in peace, which is do not kill the innocent."
In Britain, however, unlike the US and some other European countries, a large majority of politicians in all the main parties supports regulated embryo research and therapeutic cloning.
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Source: Internet
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