Michigan has huge hopes for tiny stem cells

Deep inside metal drums of liquid nitrogen at the University of Michigan might be the key to a replacement heart valve for 9-year-old Will Marzolf.

Or the formula for treating the Huntington's disease that killed Krissi Putansu's grandfather and uncle and now threatens her mother.

Or the clues to protecting Marlene Goodman's great-children from the genetics that have curled her fingers to useless angles.

Embryonic stem cell research is a fledgling science, but four years after Michigan voters lifted the ban on such research, U-M is staking its claim.

"They are promise," Goodman said of an embryonic stem cell line known as UM11-1PGD.

FUNDING: Stem cells' promise hits funding wall in Michigan

The line -- essentially a culture of infinitely reproducing cells -- was created earlier this year by U-M researcher Gary Smith from an embryo that carried the genetic sequencing for Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, a condition that has dogged Goodman since she was a little girl. Over the years, it has slowly withered her muscles, gnarling her fingers.

"They're not going to help me or my children," Goodman said of the cell line, "but it will help someone's children some day."

On Wednesday, Smith submitted his 11th and 12th embryonic stem cell lines to the National Institutes of Health for inclusion on a national registry, adding to 10 lines submitted and accepted earlier this year. Inclusion on the registry places U-M and Smith, the co-director of U-M's A.A. Taubman Consortium for Stem Cell Therapies, on an impressive list of stem cell line contributors from across the country, such as Harvard University and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

All together, 184 embryonic stem cells lines have been contributed to the registry since 2009, when President Barack Obama loosened restrictions placed by former President George W. Bush in 2001 that banned federal funding on newly developed human embryonic stem cell lines.

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Michigan has huge hopes for tiny stem cells