Second Failure May Spell the End for Fetal Tissue Transplants.

Hailed for 15 years as a very promising remedy for Parkinson's disease, a second abysmal failure using tissue transplanted from aborted babies (although not yet published in a medical journal) is apparently already being widely discussed in medical circles, according to the Wall Street Journal.

This latest setback came 21 months after the New York Times published a devastating story detailing the failure of an earlier attempt, building on a report in the New England Journal of Medicine. Not only did these transplants not improve the patient's Parkinson's, they also carried dangerous side effects for the patients whose brains were infused with tissue scavenged from the brains of aborted babies.

The Journal reported that the latest results may "also damp expectations for treatments using stem cells." The reporter no doubt meant stem cells taken from human embryos, which have likewise shown no promise to date, as opposed to stem cells taken from a host of ethically acceptable sources, which have a growing track record of success. (See story, page 7.)

Parkinson's disease is characterized by a progressive loss of balance, tremors, and slurred speech. Parkinson's afflicts at least 500,000 in the U.S.

It is thought to be caused in part by the death of cells that make the neurotransmitter dopamine, an important chemical found in the brain. Scientists had speculated that the infusion of cells taken from the brains of aborted babies would provide a new supply of cells capable of making dopamine which could, at a minimum, treat the symptoms, if not reverse the progress of the disease altogether.

The Journal reported that Warren Olanow, a neuroscientist at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, presented the results of the study, which involved 34 patients, at the 7th International Congress of Parkinson's Disease and Movement Disorders, held in November in Miami Beach, Florida. The experiments require harvesting tissue from as many as eight fetuses, each approximately six to nine weeks old, for each transplant.

The Journal reported that even though brain scans showed that the transplanted cells appeared to be functioning normally, "researchers reportedly weren't able to find any measurable improvement on tests of motor and other skills" and there were also serious side effects.