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German scientists and clinicians are locked in a dispute over whether adult stem cells should be used to treat patients before the safety and effectiveness of the method has been fully proven.
The debate has hit the local media in recent days after scientists and clinicians presented new and apparently contradictory results on stem cells at the European Society of Cardiology congress in Vienna.
Cardiologist Bodo Eckehard Strauer from the University of Düsseldorf reported the results of a study of 34 heart attack patients who had been injected with adult stem cells drawn from their own bone marrow.
"Even patients with the most seriously damaged hearts can be treated with their own stem cells instead of waiting and hoping for a transplant," he said in Die Zeit newspaper.
Strauer said his study had shown that adult stem cell treatment could help those suffering from presently untreatable conditions and that more research on embryonic stem cells was not necessary.
But in the same article, Jürgen Hescheler, the director of the neurophysiology at Cologne University begged to differ.
Hescheler is the only one of two scientists in Germany who has been given permission to conduct research on human embryonic stem cells.
Hescheler said that his team had failed to find evidence in experiments on mice that stem cells drawn from the bone marrow had developed into heart cells, and he noted that there was still no evidence that the adult stem cells injected into Strauer's patients had actually turned into healthy heart muscle cells.
Furthermore, he warned that injecting high concentrations of adult stem cells into arteries close to patients' hearts could lead to the formation of tumors and to disturbances in heart rhythms.
"We need more basic science to know how cells integrate into the host tissue, and especially whether there is an electrical integration. It is still not clear whether adult stem cells cause strong arrhythmias, which could be fatal," Hescheler said in an interview with The Scientist.
"I really don't think anything of having early clinical trials like this. It's a stroke of luck that nothing has happened yet," he said.
Hescheler's experiments in mice have, however, shown that embryonic stem cells can replace cells killed during a heart attack.
Despite the tiff, it seems that scientists and the clinicians will continue working side by side in the field of stem cells.
Several clinicians in Germany, including heart surgeon Gustav Steinhoff, from the University of Rostock, and Andreas Zeiher, from the University of Frankfurt, have also started treating patients who have suffered heart attacks with adult stem cells.
Janna Eberhardt observed in Germany's Stuttgarter Zeitung that the stem cell debate is far from over. "It is still an open question whether the stem cell therapy will live up to all expectations. A larger number of patients need to be studied for a longer period of time," she told the paper.
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