Miracle Cures or Just False Hopes? : Medicine: A U.S. doctor believes a Moscow hospital will be able to treat myriad illnesses with fetal tissue. But others are skeptical.
An American physician, frustrated that the Bush Administration has stymied research on clinical uses of human fetal tissue, is helping to open a center in Moscow to treat myriad illnesses--from Down’s syndrome to third-degree burns--with fetal tissue.
Some of Dr. Eugene Molner’s fellow American doctors have expressed skepticism over the treatments’ effectiveness. But Molner said it is that wariness that has prevented fetal tissue therapy from becoming widespread and easing the suffering of many people.
“Patients who think they have lost their last hope will find it here,” he declared on a recent visit to this city.
The International Institute of Biological Medicine--using the facilities of the prestigious Moscow hospital that formerly cared for Kremlin bosses--is ready to receive patients from Russia and abroad, Molner said.
Scientists believe that fetal tissue research may offer great promise for treating Parkinson’s disease, diabetes, epilepsy, Alzheimer’s disease, spinal cord injuries and other maladies. Fetal tissue is especially adaptive to transplantation, and scientists hope that transplanted fetal cells will take over the functions of cells that have been damaged or destroyed.
But U.S. specialists say potential patients of the Moscow clinic should not hurry out to buy their plane tickets in hopes of a miracle cure. In the United States, fetal tissue implants have been used to treat only diabetes and Parkinson’s disease in a handful of patients, and with mixed results.
Dr. Gennady T. Sukhikh, Russian organizer of the new center, says Moscow is the ideal place for such a clinic and the research facility that will go with it because there is no stigma attached to abortion--still the most common form of birth control here. There were 3.5-million abortions performed last year alone in Russia, twice the number of births. There is no controversy over using tissue or organs from aborted fetuses and no regulatory agency to stall the clinic’s start-up.
The ethical and moral questions surrounding the use of tissue from aborted fetuses has held up research in Europe and America. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush banned the use of federal money for such research. With the anti-abortion rights lobby also lined up against it, fetal tissue research has become so controversial that it is very difficult to get private funding. President-elect Bill Clinton has promised that he will lift the federal ban.
Sukhikh says he hopes the Moscow clinic and research facility are allowed to open without any noisy opposition from European and American anti-abortion activists.
“We want to save lives of people with Parkinson’s, diabetes and other potentially deadly diseases,” says Sukhikh, a leading Russian perinatal specialist. “Is this humane or not?”
Although the clinic is sponsored by the Russian Health Ministry, American specialists in the field are wary of the Moscow center’s claims to be able to treat Down’s syndrome, Type 1 diabetes, Parkinson’s, poorly healing fractures and geriatric conditions, including Alzheimer’s.
“They’re shooting in the dark,” says Dr. Curt Freed of the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, who is researching treating Parkinson’s disease with fetal tissue transplantation under one of the rare privately funded programs.
Clinical uses of fetal tissue are still very much at the experimental stage, American specialists say, and Russian researchers have published little on the subject.
“Just having access (to fetal tissue) does not relieve you of the responsibility to have a solid scientific approach,” Freed added in a telephone interview from his Denver office. “They’re putting the cart before the horse. They have to publish the outcome of their research first.”
Freed says he worries that people desperate to find cures will travel to Moscow and spend thousands of dollars, only to be disappointed. “I would hate to see people take their Down’s syndrome babies to Moscow,” he says.
John C. Fletcher, a medical ethics professor at the University of Virginia who has specialized in issues raised by using fetal tissue, also says the Moscow institute’s claims are at best exaggerated.
“Is this really a research center advertising itself as a clinical treatment center?” he asks. “It seems to be extremely premature.”
But Molner argues that European research on clinical uses of animal and human fetal tissue can be traced back decades and is extensive, although it has been largely ignored in America. The doctors who will perform the tissue transplants in Moscow are highly qualified professionals, he says, and their work will be overseen by a panel drawn from the best of Russia’s medical research Establishment.
The collection of the fetal tissue--which is checked for viruses and other abnormalities, frozen, then stored--is being carried out under strict control. For most diseases, Sukhikh says, the tissue will simply be injected into the patient.
In one highly controversial application, Molner says, the center will treat Down’s syndrome with a method borrowed from Franz Schmid, a German doctor. For years, according to Schmid, he has used animal fetal tissue to improve mental and physical abilities of children with the genetic disorder, which results from a chromosome defect and is the primary cause of retardation.
“He would have liked to use human fetal tissue, but of course working in Germany, where most abortions are illegal, he was not able to do that,” says Molner, who lives in Geneva.
But an American specialist on retardation who has reviewed Schmid’s publications says that the German’s studies were not scientifically sound and that he failed to prove that his injections of animal fetal tissue were beneficial and did no harm.
“I am constantly looking for a way to help the mentally retarded, and if he has a way of doing it, he should spread the gospel here,” says Felix de la Cruz of the National Institutes of Health. “But based on what I know about his approach, it would be unethical for me to recommend it.”
The Moscow institute’s founders want to attract both foreign patients, who will pay about $8,000 a treatment, and world-class specialists to do research at the center. But Molner says the center must first develop a reputation.
“The image of Russian medical experts in the West is not very good,” Molner concedes. “But this general impression does not apply to the people on the top.”
Times Staff Writer Marlene Cimons in Washington contributed to this article.
