So anti-abortion activists are now demanding that the US not fund vaccines made with cell lines derived from legally aborted fetuses. This is a shameful distraction from the urgent need for a vaccine.
sciencemag.org
sciencemag.org
One of the cell lines in question, HEK293, is an essential tool for almost all molecular and cell biology work. Let me explain briefly why these cells are important and essential for vaccine development.
When you take cells from any living mammal and try to culture them, they don't divide indefinitely. After a few rounds of cell division, they hit what's called the "Hayflick limit" and senesce, or stop dividing. Here's the basics from Wikipedia:
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
That's not very convenient for doing experiments in cell culture. If you want to be able to repeat and reproduce biochemical studies in vitro, you need an "immortal" cell line: one that keeps dividing so you don't have to keep isolating different cells from different donors.
Cancer cells are immortalized, which is why many continuous cell lines are derived from tumors. However, these are usually differentiated into specific cell types--liver, brain, etc--so they aren't always representative of other kinds of cells and have type-specific quirks.
Even within cell lines from similar tumors, there can be differences that impact experiments. Huh7 and HepG2 cells are both from liver tumors. However, only Huh7 cells can grow hepatitis C virus, because HepG2 cells don't express a type of microRNA needed for virus replication.
One way around this is to use embryonic cells, like the HEK293 cells in question here. Embryonic cells are less differentiated, and are more of a cellular blank slate. They can be applicable to multiple types of cells, which is great for studying general cell biology.
HEK293 cells are a great example of this. Although HEK="human embryonic kidney", it's not even clear what KIND of cells HEK293s are associated with. They might be kidney, adrenal, or neuronal. Read the "history" section of the HEK293 wiki entry:
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
What makes HEK293 cells VERY useful in the lab is a more practical property: they are highly transfectable, which means they are very, very good at taking up DNA and expressing it. So if you want to study how a virus interacts with a specific protein, you can transfect the...
...gene for that protein into your HEK293s & they'll express it. Many other cell lines are extremely difficult to transfect and require special reagents/methods. My grad school colleagues & I used to joke that you could spit on your 293s and they'd start expressing salivary genes
(We never actually tested that, because we were overworked already & that also would contaminate the cultures with the bacteria and fungi that are also abundant in saliva. The transfection reagents at the time didn't work as well with antibiotics/antifungals in the culture media)
Anyway, because they are embryonic/undifferentiated and can be efficiently transfected, they are really useful for vaccine development. Blocking research or pulling funding from cells using HEK293s would be a major setback in COVID research.
It astonishes me that people who purport to be "pro-life" would impose an ideological block on using vaccines developed with HEK293 cells, which, again, were obtained from a legally aborted fetus in the Netherlands nearly 50 years ago.
Is ideological purity adequate to justify the thousands or even millions of #COVID19 deaths that could be prevented by a safe and effective vaccine? How is that a "pro-life" standpoint?
This line from the letter to @SteveFDA really got me:
βThankfully, other [COVID-19] vaccines β¦ utilize cell lines not connected to unethical procedures and methods.β
Well, those vaccines mentioned in the full letter use HeLa cells, so let's take a moment to talk about ETHICS
βThankfully, other [COVID-19] vaccines β¦ utilize cell lines not connected to unethical procedures and methods.β
Well, those vaccines mentioned in the full letter use HeLa cells, so let's take a moment to talk about ETHICS
HeLa cells are not from an embryo, they are from a woman named Henrietta Lacks, and they were obtained in a highly UNETHICAL way.
(If you haven't read @RebeccaSkloot's phenomenal book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, you should do so immediately.)
(If you haven't read @RebeccaSkloot's phenomenal book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, you should do so immediately.)
Long story short, Henrietta Lacks was a poor Black tobacco farmer whose cervical cells were taken and cultured without her consent before she died of cervical cancer. The cell line that resulted, named HeLa, went on to be instrumental in 6 decades of medical breakthroughs.
Henrietta Lacks's children did not learn about this until decades later. They have not shared in any of the profits derived from their mother's cells, obtained without her consent. They have been deeply traumatized and betrayed by the research enterprise.
npr.org
npr.org
So to say HeLa cells are more ethically pure than HEK293 cells is incorrect and appalling. The very existence of HeLa cells depends on the systemic racism and misogyny that allowed Henrietta Lacks's cells to be collected without her consent or compensation in the first place.
To claim that HeLa cells are "ethical" erases what Skloot described as the Lacks family's "lifelong struggle to make peace with the existence of those cells, and the science that made them possible." Is this what "pro-life" opponents of HEK293 cells mean by "ethical" sources?
Which is a more acceptable ethical price to pay: a single legally aborted fetal tissue sample donated with proper consent to medical research, or decades of a family's pain and trauma, that has markedly harmed their lives? How is that "pro-life"?
Furthermore, how can one group's specific religious ideology justify delaying or denying a desperately needed vaccine that will save countless lives on the basis that a Black family's pain is somehow more ethical than the products of a legal medical procedure?
Religious and ideological extremism has no place in an ethical debate about #SARSCoV2 #COVID19 #coronavirus vaccine development. If you truly value human life, then don't stand in the way of a lifesaving vaccine, especially by justifying it with convoluted ethical equivalencies.
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