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Posted on Nov 10, 2005, 5 a.m.
By Bill Freeman
About 3,000 people have sought to be test subjects for stem cell clinical trials run through the new World Stem Cell Hub (WSCH) in Seoul.
About 3,000 people have sought to be test subjects for stem cell clinical trials run through the new World Stem Cell Hub (WSCH) in Seoul.
Registration for clinical trials opened today. From all applications, researchers led by cloning pioneer Hwang Woo-suk will choose about 100 people with Parkinson's and spinal cord damage to participate in experimental treatments.
Subjects will be chosen based on when their illnesses began, the location and degree of damage and the likely benefit they might receive from being treated with cloned stem cells.
According to a report by The Chosun Ilbo :
Possible test subjects will go through a number of examinations before their somatic cells will be collected and cloned pending approval by the ethics committee. The stem cells thus produced will first be used in experiments on primates and safety tests before they can eventually be used in clinical trials.
On Tuesday morning, the WSCH website went down just five minutes after it started accepting domestic and international applications at 9 a.m. due to the flood of applicants. The number of visitors to the SNU Hospital homepage, which is connected to the WSCH, increased 10-fold to around 50,000. Patients from across the country scrambled to register at the hub set up in the hospital even before it opened, with more than 500 people able to register at the hub on the day.
The WSCH aims to give personal explanations to people not chosen for trials.
