Bio-wise and otherwise

Cybrids for cure?

It's rather intriguing to note that the UK which once frowned upon its cattle for causing mad cow disease, is now using them for serving mankind in the making of  'cybrids'. Cybrid technology is said to be of great value in finding therapy for neurological diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

Cybrids are prepared by injecting the nucleus from a human cell into an empty cell taken from another animal.  Because these cybrids contain about 99.9 per cent human material and 0.1 per cent animal, their use is being frowned upon by many ethical and religious organizations. However, one of the chief advantages of using them is that  they are a substitute for human eggs which are more difficult to obtain in such large quantities. Use of hybrid embryos is also questioned by many for a variety of ethical reasons.

The cybrid technology offers a way to derive embryonic stem cells corresponding to individual patients suffering from a genetic disease, such that the disease or potential therapies can be studied on cells in the lab - rather than on the patients themselves.

The principle of cybrid technology is to take a stem cell (of a cow, in this case), empty its contents, inject it with adult human DNA and culture the cell in the lab. It will multiply from 2 to four to eight to sixteen cells and so on. After around 6 days,  these cells are harvested and observed under circumstances akin to diseases such as Alzheimer's. If a cybrid is implanted, it can grow into a freak 'chimera'.

However, the legal proposal clearly states that such cybrid cells be destroyed in 14 days' time, beyond which they cannot survive an  implantation.

Chimera concept?

Posted at 05:06AM Sep 07, 2007 by Manju in Sun  |