Stem-cell miracles without moral pitfalls

By Jean Prescott
Knight Ridder News Service

Some words spark debate every time they are spoken, few more surely than "stem cells." Many ordinary people who smile on the possible outcome of stem-cell research, namely the regeneration of failed or injured body parts, frown on obtaining stem cells from embryos grown in a lab.

"Miracle Cell" makes a case for regenerative medicine, and does so within many people's boundaries of acceptance.

Viewers will meet patients who have enjoyed varying degrees of recovery from previously irreversible injuries. Their recoveries have been attributed to interventions using stem cells harvested not from lab-grown embryos but from the patients' own bodies.

"You don't have the controversy or the rejection," says Joy Veron, a thirtysomething Texas school teacher and mother of three who suffered a spinal cord injury when she threw herself in front of an SUV carrying her children. The vehicle was about to roll over a cliff, and Veron says she jumped in front of it hoping to stop it or "at least slow it down."

"I felt it start to pull me under," she says by phone from her home in Texas. "The underside of the SUV hit me twice, and on the third hit, I felt my back break. At that point, I went flat, and the rear tire rolled over the length of my body," squashing internal organs and bones. "They tell me that the only thing that saved my life was that I had my head turned, and the tire missed it."

For the record, the SUV did not plunge into the canyon, and Veron's children were uninjured. Her father was able to brake it in time. She says she remembers, as she lay crippled on the ground, her dad asking, "Joy, what were you thinking?"

"I guess I wasn't thinking," she says.

Others featured in the hour are 19-year-old quadriplegic Laura Dominguez and Michigan teenager Dimitri Bonnville, whose heart was punctured in an accident with a nail gun.

Some of these patients received stem-cell transplants in a procedure not yet approved here by the FDA; their surgeries were performed by Dr. Carlos Lima at the Egas Moniz Hospital in Lisbon, Portugal, where he and his team harvested stem cells from the patients' own noses for transplant into spinal lesions.

The cells used in Lima's landmark procedure are among those produced by every human body over a lifetime, their purpose being to repair hundreds of different types of cells in our own bodies. The ability to use and manipulate these cells has started to revolutionize medicine.

The Michigan teen's physician, Dr. William O'Neill, at Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Mich., chose stem-cell treatment of a different sort for young Bonnville. Bone marrow cells from the boy's hip were injected in solution directly into his heart, which had been punctured by a three-inch nail.

The teen, who before the treatment had been expected to die, is recovering, doing quite well.

Veron admits that her case has "been a slow process, but I have had increased sensation," she says. "The biggest improvement (in the nine months since the surgery) has been in my left leg."

As for Dominguez, her recovery has been remarkable. Left a quadriplegic by an accident, she underwent surgery like Veron's in Portugal. Two months later, she not only was able to stand but to raise up on tiptoe.