How exactly fetal tissue is used for medicine

By Carina Storrs, Special to CNN Updated August 5, 2015

¹CNN) Fetal tissue has been used since the 1930s for vaccine development, and more recently to help advance stem cell research and treatments for degenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s disease. Researchers typically take tissue samples from a fetus that has been aborted (under conditions permitted by law) and grow cells from the tissue in Petri dishes.

²Many of the uses of fetal tissue — and much of the debate — are not new. “It’s just that the public is fi nding out about it,” said Insoo Hyun, associate professor of bioethics at Case Western Reserve University.

³In addition, the ways that fetal tissue are allowed to be obtained and used are not new either, Hyun said. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released guidelines on the topic in the 1990s.

⁴The federal regulations state that women must decide to have an abortion before clinicians can ask whether they would like to donate fetal tissue. One concern is that women would have more pregnancies or abortions because they want to donate fetal tissue. In addition, clinicians performing the abortions cannot receive payment from researchers who will receive fetal materials, except for reimbursement for costs such as shipping.

⁵Despite the long history of using fetal tissue in medicine and research, the practice could be on the way out. Even though it has led to important medical advances in the last several decades, “in the future, the need for fetal tissue will go down because of advances in stem cell [technology] that will take over,” Hyun said.

⁶One of the earliest advances with fetal tissue was to use fetal kidney cells to create the fi rst poliovirus vaccines, which are now estimated to save 550,000 lives worldwide every year.

⁷In the early days of making the vaccine, researchers infected fetal kidney cells in Petri dishes to produce a large amount of virus that they could then harvest, purify and use to vaccinate people.

⁸Today manufacturers of the polio vaccine use other types of human cells, which weren’t available in the mid-1900s. They also use monkey cells, which they originally avoided for fear that making the vaccine in animal cells could put people at risk of diseases from other species.

⁹Advances in stem cell therapy, too, could help phase out the practice of collecting cells from fetal tissue. Many re-searchers can now make stem cells by reprogramming skin cells from an adult into a “blank check” stem cell state. This can then go on to develop into neurons or any other cell in the body that researchers can grow in labs and study to better understand diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease.

¹ºHowever, as Hyun explained, research on these stem cells is still in the early stages and scientists need to make sure the neurons or whatever other type of cells they steer the stem cells to become behave like the cells in the body they want them to emulate. So scientists may still grow fetal neuron cells, for example, in a Petri dish alongside stem cell-derived neuron cells as a reference point until they have more confi dence in the stem cell technology, said Hyun.

Texto adaptado. Disponível em: <http://edition.cnn.com/2015/07/17/health/fetal-tissue-explainer/>. Acesso em: 27 out. 2015.

Por suas implicações morais, o uso de tecido fetal em pesquisas médicas é regulado pela bioética. Nos Estados Unidos, a legislação federal sobre o assunto determina que o(a):