Foetal cells: an unlikely ally to finding the Covid-19 vaccine
Foetal cells have been involved in drug discovery since the 1960s, yet the controversy surrounding their use has only grown. Now, the debate enters the White House.
President Trump, who recently recovered from Covid-19, has attributed his swift recovery to the controversial experimental drug Regn-Cov2, developed by American biotechnology company Regeneron Pharmaceuticals. Image Source: Charles Deluvio on Unsplash
The battle over the ethicality of abortion has been raging on now for centuries. Despite the gradual advancement in women’s rights over the decades, the debate continues to divide us. More recently, the scientific world has its own part in the conflict over the ethicality of using foetal cells for research. This controversial technique has once again come to the forefront of news following President Trump’s endorsement of an antibody cocktail tested on foetal cells.
“They call it therapeutics… I call that a cure.”
Foetal cell lines have been an essential tool for many scientific fields, especially for disease and vaccine-related research. These cell lines are incredibly useful because they are cells that have been immortalised and continuously cultured for decades. The ethical opposition to their use arises from where these cells are derived, this being from the stem cells of aborted foetuses. Even though these abortions occurred with no relation to research, there is an ongoing dispute on whether we should be using them, and what moral implications this might pose on its users.
A brief history of foetal cell lines
It all began in the 1960s with Leonard Hayflick’s discovery of the foetal cell line. He obtained the initial tissue sample from a legal abortion of a 16-week-old foetus from Sweden. Through experimentation, he found that these cells could be frozen, reconstituted and grown indefinitely. This meant that a single source of foetal cells could be cultivated to produce an infinite number of cells. Hayflick’s cell line WI-38 rapidly replaced testing on animal cells and tumour cells and emerged as the new protagonist in viral vaccine research.
Previously, tumour cells lines, such as HeLa cells, were used for experimentation of vaccines. However, they came with their own limitations. For instance, whereas the cells in our body typically carry 46 chromosomes of DNA, HeLa cells are hyper-triploid and contain between 76-80 chromosomes. What WI-38 cell lines made possible was our ability to instead model the activities of healthy human cells. The physiological, structural and biochemical processes under controlled conditions could now be studied through these cells in vitro.
You might have heard of these cell lines before, but under a different name: stem cells. Stem cells are cells that have yet to specialise. Due to this trait, they can mimic the behaviour of different human cell types. Along with the ease at which they can adapt to different environments and continue to grow rapidly, foetal cell lines have become a staple of the laboratory. WI-38 was instrumental for the discovery of innumerable vaccines, such as for polio, rubella, measles and rabies. It has been estimated that the vaccines developed using WI-38 and its derivatives have prevented 4.5 billion cases of disease globally.
A cure for Covid-19?
As we speak, there is a global race to find a Covid-19 vaccine and, with the number of deaths continuing to rise worldwide, the pressure is on. Some of the most notable frontrunners, namely Oxford/AstraZeneca, CanSino and Moderna, are using the cell line HEK-293 as part of their development of a vaccine. The use of foetal cell lines by these teams has been considered crucial to their work; this being because the cell lines can actually be used to produce the vaccine through the use of their intracellular machinery.
To paint a picture for how this works, let’s look at AstraZeneca’s viral vector vaccine. Here, attenuated viruses, such as adenovirus, are engineered to contain the genetic material for producing a SARS-CoV-2 protein: the spike protein the virus uses to hijack our own cells. The HEK-293 cells will essentially act as a micro-factory for the mass production of these modified viruses. This cell line is unique because they express genes necessary for the viral vectors to propagate. Once propagated, these viruses are then purified to be used as the vaccine. The attenuated viruses in the vaccine present the SARS-CoV-2 proteins on its surface, to which the body triggers a small immune response against these foreign invaders. Consequently, the immune system produces a specialised defence to recognise and suppress the virus before the body becomes sick, if the individual were to ever become infected.
The Trump-Regeneron controversy
The controversy over the use of foetal cells have come anew from the recent report that Donald Trump had received REGN-COV2, a treatment of monoclonal antibodies developed by Regeneron, that had been tested on the HEK-293 cell line. Monoclonal antibodies act by binding to virus particles and preventing them from entering our own cells. This blocks the ability of the virus to replicate and sets out the tagged virus particles for destruction by the immune system. Trump went so far as to praise the drug in an interview after his release, stating that “they call it therapeutics… I call that a cure.”
The controversy comes with the conflict between Trump’s endorsement of this supposedly miraculous cure and the firm anti-abortion stance of his administration. This has called into question Trump’s real motivation behind his endorsement. A clue may be in Trump’s clear ties to the CEO of Regeneron, whom he is acquainted through Trump’s gold club in New York, as Regeneron’s shares shot up by 7 per cent after the president’s announcement.
This is not Trump’s first encounter with foetal cell lines either. Trump introduced a ban on the funding of government projects that involved the use of foetal tissues. Under this new ban, scientists working for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) were not allowed to conduct studies using foetal tissues. Those funded by the NIH, such as university researchers, who do wish to use them now need to undertake a lengthy process of review by an ethics advisory board that can take up to six months, making it virtually impossible for their use in research to be approved. Essentially, Trump’s ban has become an obstacle for government scientists conducting the same research methodology that led to the production of drugs like REGN-COV2.
The importance of implementing science policy that is both facilitating of research and comprehensively ethical is clear. Now more than ever, the public are turning their attention to the scientists for answers. Whether you agree with abortions or not, no one can deny the huge impact foetal cell lines have had and continue to have. They are an important component of research in the world of science for a wide variety of fields. They have been the key for the development of many vital vaccines and may soon be a part of finding one more.