Science funding

I’ve been getting a few questions lately asking why isn’t this type of research (insert area of interest here) funded or why isn’t there a cure for (insert common disease here)? Well, in all honesty, these questions actually come up all the time, but recently they have resurfaced. Scientists are funded (fat and happy) and pharmaceuticals are expensive, so why isn’t there a cure for x or why isn’t there more focus on y? In reality, funding for science is far below what the general public perceives. Many interesting topics aren’t researched because scientists don’t have the funds to do so. It isn’t a lack of interest or that scientists are “hiding the cure” to make money, it is that there is less and less funding available.

Science is very expensive. Institutions including colleges, universities, pharmaceutical companies, provide most of the equipment for research, usually in core facilities so that there is general access. These machines are very specialized and very expensive, both to buy and to maintain. A majority of scientists rely on grant money to cover the cost of their staff, the supplies, and to a great extent themselves. As the economy has slipped, funding for science has also dried up. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the major sponsor of biomedical research and isn’t able to fund the same percentage of applicants it has in the past. This is for two main reasons. First, more scientists are applying and second, less money is allocated. Because of this, more scientists have relied on non-profit organizations that grant money for research. This is an excellent source of funding, but also limited. So, as funding has been cut, more people apply to non-profit groups, making that funding also much more competitive. And so on down the line. Pharmaceutical companies spend a lot of money on research and development. The number of drugs that are investigates far exceeds the slim number that make it to market. The further down the road of testing a drug that the drug fails and has to be removed from consideration, the greater the loss for the pharmaceutical company. If a drug looks promising but fails to do what is intended during phase II clinical trials, billions have been lost. Pharmaceutical companies do have a lot to gain from a profitable drug, but developing drugs is not a trivial venture.

Research takes time. Progress is made every day, but it may not be the type of progress that hits the headlines or astounds the general public. Research is just that - re-search. Experiments have to be repeated and confirmed prior to publishing. It is critical that findings are reproducible so that researchers are lead down the wrong path and bad decisions are made.

In a perfect world, there would be unlimited funds for research and cures for all things would exist. However, scientists are limited by the funding and resources they have. This is why it is important to keep funding research either through the NIH or through non-profit sources.

stem cells?!

Thank you to the submitter of this week’s topic: in light of my last blog, what about stem cells and why all the controversy? This is a fascinating topic and parts are hotly debated. Stem cells come in a several flavors. There are adult stem cells, hematopoetic (white cells in the blood) stem cells, embryonic stem cells (ES) and the most recently identified inducible pluripotent stem cells (iPS). These iPS cells are artificially derived cells that are created from adult cells by forcing the expression of a particular set of genes.

A common characteristic of all stem cells is that they are all slow growing cells that are “immature”. Given the appropriate signals, they can be coerced to develop into any cell in the body. The most easily manipulated are the embryonic stem cells, but these are highly controversial since they come from embryos (usually from ones that are donated after in vitro fertilization techniques. They are the frozen embryos that are not implanted or used in that process). Use of ES cells opens the whole debate about when life begins and it is morally right to use embryos in this manner, even if their fate would be to be frozen permanently? That is a discussion for another day.

The overall goal with stem cells is to isolate them from various sources, including by the way from fat cells in our bodies (I’d donate!), and stimulate them to become whatever cell type is necessary. Have a bad heart? Take stem cells and stimulate them to become heart cells that can be introduced into the ailing heart and “cure” it. In reality, this isn’t close to happening. Stem cells are being studied and understood more and more each day. The field has moved forward quite rapidly and hopefully will be widely used in clinical settings some day. For now, it is too soon to really use them in meaningful clinical ways, especially iPS cells. As more is understood about how these cells grow and (more importantly) how they don’t keep growing, the better their use will be as therapy. Until then, they are being used in cell culture models to understand more about how cells work and develop. A useful and informative by-product to these studies is that this information can be used by non-stem cell researchers to understand how those cells work as well. In other words, the research isn’t limited to just stem cells alone.

Using cells in tissue culture

The last blog about the HeLa cells made me think about a question that is asked all the time. If we have cells that can grow in culture and can be used to test all aspects of biomedical science, why do we need to test in animals and in humans? The short answer is that cell culture (or tissue culture) -- other terms for growing human or animal cells in plastic dishes in the lab -- is just one part of the whole puzzle. It is just one of the items in the toolbox. Ideas and theories about how cells work and how a drug may be beneficial to stop cancer growth or make a heart cell beat are hashed out in cultured cells. These cells provide the basis (proof of principle) that theories work. These are also a single population of cells that are tested. Just muscle cells that comprise part of the heart can be grown in isolation. It is easy to test how these cells grow and work, but it is isolated and no other neighboring cells are involved or communicating with our heart muscle cell when it’s in culture systems. So, while tissue culture helps ID how heart muscle cells work, it is not an entire heart organ and may behave differently.

Many things can be tested initially in culture to determine if the hypothesis is correct and cells work the way scientists think they do. Say a new drug is developed. This drug could be designed to attack a particular target, for instance a certain protein in the cell that is involved in cell proliferation. First, the drug will be tested in tissue culture cells to see if it is effective, to learn more about how it works and if there could be potential unintentional side effects. Our new drug can effectively attack its target and stop cell growth, but it could also attack other targets and cause other outcomes. After the drug is tested and appears to be effective, animal models are next. FDA approved drugs must be tested in animals in order to get approval to be tested or used in humans. Many things can change when a whole organism is being tested including if the drug is effective. So, tissue culture serves an important role in labs but it isn’t everything and can be very different from what happens when the drug is given to humans.