New Depression Drug Likely Made With Cells From Abortions

via StevenErtelt

New Depression Drug Likely Made With Cells From Abortions

by Rebecca Taylor

I have suffered from depression my whole adult life. Symptoms of depression and anxiety run in my family. So any story about new treatments for depression always catch my eye.

But this one caught my eye for another reason. One of the indications of depression is a reduced hippocampus, a part of the brain that controls, among other things, memory and spatial navigation. Scientists have found a drug that increases the size of the hippocampus and they hope that this will not only treat depression, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer’s but cure them.

Anyone who has ever suffered with depression, or know someone who has, is cheering. Depression is devastating and debilitating and curing it would be a great achievement. But that is not what caught my eye. It is that this drug was tested with Neuralstem’s cell line. A cell line that, with a little digging, looks to have come from an aborted fetus. From a Bloomberg press release:

The researchers used a line of neural stem cells developed by Neuralstem Inc., a closely held biotechnology company based in Rockville, Maryland. The company developed the line from fetal tissue donated by a woman who underwent an elective abortion at 8 weeks.

The stem cells, taken from an area near the developing spinal cord of the fetus, have the theoretical ability to develop or differentiate into any of three cell types found in the nervous system. The cells were kept alive in culture and chemically manipulated to keep them from differentiating.

So the question is, would it be ethical to take this drug for depression if it becomes an FDA approved treatment? The manufacture of the drug itself does not require aborted fetal tissue. It was only discovered and developed using cells that look to be obtained from an elective abortion.