Jeanne Loring holds a petri dish with induced pluripotent stem cells from a Parkinsons patient. The U.S. Supreme Court will be asked to intervene over a controversial embryonic stem cell patent, opponents of the patent said Thursday. Jeanne Loring, a stem cell scientist at The Scripps Research Institute, said the court will be asked Friday to overturn a lower court decision and allow the opponents to seek cancellation of the patent held by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, or WARF. Loring and two public interest groups, Consumer Watchdog and the Public Patent Foundation, have been trying to get that patent overturned since 2006. Another patent giving rights over induced pluripotent stem cells has been waived by WARF. Loring, who is researching the use of induced pluripotent stem cells to treat Parkinson's disease, said the remaining patent impedes development of embryonic stem cell therapies. Embryonic stem cell therapies are reaching the clinical stage, such as San Diego's ViaCyte, which recently began trials of its therapy for Type 1 diabetes, derived from human embryonic stem cells. "We think that now embryonic stem cells really are showing their worth in clinical studies, it's very important to just wipe this thing off the books, … Continue reading →

Special Arrangement Nourl Al Zahara suffered from cardiomyopathy, a condition in which the heart muscles get enlarged and weak. A seven-year-old girl from Iraq underwent stem cell treatment for a heart ailment at Frontier Lifeline Hospital, recently. The child, Nourl Al Zahara from Baghdad, is the only child of Salem, a botany teacher, and Raza, a lawyer. She was diagnosed with dilated cardiomyopathy, a condition in which the heart muscles get enlarged and weak. When she was six months old, she had trouble breathing, and when she began walking, would get tired easily. Her skeletal muscles were also weak. Stem cell treatment was chosen, a release from the hospital said, as doctors wanted to give Nourls heart a chance to regenerate and ensure her quality of her life was not compromised. As the heart does not have the capacity to heal by itself, stem cell therapy helps in the process. The treatment was successful and the child is now healthy and looking forward to going to school, said CEO and chairman of the hospital K.M. Cherian, according to the release. The hospital has permission and approval from the Indian Council of Medical Research for stem cell treatment for heart diseases. … Continue reading →

The thorny and unresolved question of whether life itself can be patented may come again before the U.S. Supreme Court, if it accepts a motion filed Friday by Santa Monica-based Consumer Watchdog. (H/T to David Jensen's California Stem Cell Report.) The issue isn't a new one either for the consumer group or the court. Consumer Watchdog launched its challenge of a patent on human stem cells issued to the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, or WARF, in 2006. Since then the battle has been waged before the U.S. Patent Office, which overturned the patent then reinstated a narrower version; and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which hears patent appeals. The group has challenged the patent on two grounds: first, that the work covered wasn't novel or original, and second, that the Supreme Court has ruled that a "product of nature" can't be patented. That ruling came in 2013, in a case involving laboratory-isolated DNA. Even then, however, the court left the door open for patents of some biological products, notably "composite DNA," which is synthetically created in the lab. The court's attempt to split hairs, so to speak, reflects its discomfort with the very question of where … Continue reading →