Chelation-heart disease study probed

The largest alternative medicine study the government has ever launched has stopped enrolling people while officials investigate whether participants were fully informed of the risks and are being adequately protected, the Associated Press has learned.

More than 1,500 heart attack survivors are involved in the research, which tests a controversial treatment called chelation. The research was designed to test very high doses of vitamin and mineral supplements and chelation, which has not been proved effective for heart disease. Chelation (pronounced kee-LAY-shun) involves intravenous doses of a drug, disodium EDTA, that proponents claim will bind to calcium built up in artery walls and help flush it from the body.

More than two people have died, although Dr. Gervasio Lamas of the University of Miami. who's leading the study, said the deaths were not a direct result of the treatments. He said he doesn't know exactly how many deaths have occurred.

He also acknowledged that some doctors who had been involved in the study have been disciplined by state boards or have criminal records and have been asked to drop out.

BREAKTHROUGH IN STEM CELL ALTERNATIVE

Scientists are reporting that they have overcome a major obstacle to using a promising alternative to embryonic stem cells, bolstering the prospects for bypassing the political and ethical tempest around the research.

The researchers said they found a safe way to coax adult cells to regress into an embryonic state, alleviating what had been the most worrisome uncertainty about developing the cells into potential cures.

"We have removed a major roadblock for translating this into a clinical setting," said Konrad Hochedlinger, a Harvard University stem cell researcher whose research was published online Thursday by the journal Science. "I think it's an important advance."

Scientists last year shook up the scientific and political landscape by discovering how to manipulate the genes of adult cells to revert them into the equivalent of embryonic cells -- entities dubbed "induced pluripotent stem" or "iPS" cells -- which could then be transformed into any type of cell in the body.

But the first iPS cells were created by ferrying four genes into the DNA of adult cells using retroviruses, which can cause cancer in animals. There was also concern because the viruses integrated their genes into the cells' DNA in the course of transforming them. In the new work, Hochedlinger and his colleagues used a different type of virus, known as an adenovirus, which does not integrate its genes into a cell's DNA and therefore is believed to be harmless, to ferry the same four transformative genes into the DNA of mouse skin and liver cells.

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