In many ways, 9-year-old Jacob Sontag is much like his fourth grade classmates. He loves reading, watching movies, and listening to music, and he’s well liked by a large circle of friends. However, Jacob is not a typical boy. He has Canavan disease, a rare neurodegenerative disorder that has gradually depleted the myelin, or electrical insulation, in his brain and confined him to a wheelchair. Jacob and his family are looking to a controversial experimental approach to cure him someday.
“We hear a lot of talk about the hope and the promise of stem cells,” says Jacob’s mother, Jordana Holovach.
Jacob’s doctor, neuroscientist Paola Leone of the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in Camden, N.J., says that if today’s early research pans out, stem cells transplanted into the boy’s brain eventually might replace the myelin-producing cells that he lacks.
Researchers seeking cures for many other medical conditions&emdash;including type-1 diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, osteoporosis, and heart disease&emdash;are also looking to stem cell transplants for cures.
Stem cells’ essential nature&emdash;their capacity to grow into more than one of the body’s 300-odd cell types&emdash;has many scientists buzzing about possibilities of treating disease in entirely new ways and of revealing secrets of the body’s early development. Over the past 5 years, researchers have performed numerous experiments with stem cells collected from embryos and mature tissues&emdash;called embryonic and adult stem cells, respectively. However, for this approach to reach its full potential, problems with the cells’ tricky biology must be overcome. Many researchers also say that the government is hindering scientific advances with stem cells by setting limitations on laboratory use of human embryos.
“The promise [of stem cells] has not been exaggerated,” says Charles Jennings, executive director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute in Cambridge, Mass. “What’s been lost in discussion is how long it will take and how difficult it will be” for stem cells to live up to their billing, he says.
