Filling A Gap: British Stem Cell Studies Push Past U.S.
Elisabeth Rosenthal/IHT IHT
The International Herald Tribune, France

Monday, August 23, 2004

SOUTH MIMMS, England At the end of a winding country road lined with
hedgerows and tidy brick homes sits a new prefabricated building chock-full of
monitors and filters. Its sole purpose is to guard and nurture vials of precious,
potentially life-giving cells, called stem cells, that will soon occupy a squat green
Thermos here.

When it starts accepting cells a few months from now, the UK Stem Cell Bank will
become a sort of citadel for what is perhaps the most promising medical technology
of the last 50 years, which many believe is likely to yield cures for devastating
diseases from diabetes to Parkinson's.

But the government-funded British cell bank is also a symbol: Although embryonic
stem cell technology started in the United States, the scientific epicenter is shifting
overseas, particularly to Britain, where politicians and regulators have given their
unabashed support to the research - albeit under strictly monitored conditions.

In the United States, in contrast, stem cell research is struggling, stigmatized and
crippled by President George W. Bush's declaration that it is morally suspect and
by his decision to deny federal funding for most new projects in the field.

This month, Britain granted its first license for therapeutic cloning to a group at the
University of Newcastle, allowing scientists to create human embryos to harvest
stem cells that may be beneficial for treating diseases.

To support stem cell technologies the British government spent £2.6 million, or $4.7
million, to create the UK Stem Cell Bank and will soon require that all embryonic
stem cell lines in Britain be stored and distributed free through this clearinghouse.
Their use will be monitored by a British ethics panel.

Stem cells are primitive and potent cells that will almost certainly help scientists
understand, if not cure, diseases. But their use in research is hugely controversial
for those who believe that human life begins at conception, since the most powerful
cell lines can be derived only from very early human embryos - generally ones left
over after fertility treatments.

"We've dealt with a lot of issues and complications of embryonic stem cell research
in a straightforward way, and that has put the U.K. in a very good position," said
Glyn Stacey, the bank's director. "People are comfortable with the idea of the bank
and the research here."

That is certainly not the case in the United States, where, in 2001, Bush banned the
use of federal funds for developing or researching new embryonic stem cell lines,
saying that embryos were not a research tool but "a sacred gift from our creator."

In an instant, stem cell research in the United States became hugely expensive,
cumbersome and highly controversial. A once-rocketing technology was thrown into
a tailspin.

"Oh, it's been just terrible and it set us back enormously," said Susan Fisher, co-
director of the Program in Human Stem Cell Biology at the University of California at
San Francisco. "It is very sobering when a government puts restrictions on this very
exciting work, rather than promoting it - as has happened overseas. Our position is
180 degrees from that of our colleagues in Europe. Of course, that has cast a pall
over the field."

While British researchers have plugged ahead steadily with their work, Fisher
estimates that her group has lost at least two years - "a lifetime," she said - of
research time as it dealt with fallout from the Bush regulations.

Because university science buildings are partly subsidized by federal funds from the
National Institutes of Health, the Bush funding ban meant that scientists doing
research on new embryonic stem cell lines had to relocate to new, privately funded
and equipped labs off-campus.

And that has not been simple: Stem cell research is such a hot potato in the United
States that Fisher's eminent research group could not find a willing landlord.

"When people found out what we were doing, they said no," Fisher recalled. "The
government position has made people fearful."

She ended up constructing a new duplicate laboratory 30 miles, or 50 kilometers,
away from the San Francisco campus, which was finally completed this year.

During the lab's downtime, scientists lost two or three cell lines: They died in
inadequate temporary facilities.

The lab's former co-director, Roger Pederson, left to continue his work at
Cambridge University in England.

Scientists now spend two hours a day commuting, she said, and young researchers
avoid the field because of its expense and uncertainty.

Her lab is still "nowhere near" thinking about the kinds of cloning experiments that
are already approved in England.

"We've been busy trying to raise vast amounts of money to duplicate equipment and
research facilities that we already had. As a scientist trying to maximize research
money, it has been very painful," she said.

The University of California has helped its scientists obtain research funding from
private corporations and foundations; Fisher's new lab is funded by Geron, a
California-based biotechnology company.

But that has led to new dilemmas: The Bush funding ban has not stopped
embryonic stem cell research, but only slowed its progress and moved the ethically
sensitive research into the private sector, where it is entirely unregulated and far
more difficult to track.

"If you're worried about the slippery slope of using embryos, then fine - develop a
tight regulatory system like we have," said Stephen Minger of King's College in
London, whose stem cells will be the first deposited at the national bank.

"But the Bush policies mean that in the U.S., so long as you have private money,
you can do everything," he said - "buy embryos, create embryos, do it in your
basement. Stuff that we can't do here."

Alison Murdoch, lead investigator in the Newcastle group, said: "Developments like
this ought to be open and shared and publicly funded. It's too important for people
to hold on to it for commercial profit."

In the private sector, stem cell lines sometimes sell for tens of thousands of dollars.

And for-profit companies may be reluctant to release their cells at all.

Frustrated by the Bush ban, California has placed an initiative on this November's
ballot, Proposition 17, to use state bonds to raise about $300 million a year in
support for embryonic stem cell research.

The initiative says: "This is a new frontier of research. And, at present, our state has
no effective mechanism to fund stem cell research."

The Bush administration ban still permits work on stem cell lines created before the
ban was announced, but most of the early lines are difficult to work with and there
are too few to conduct sophisticated research, scientists said.

A few other countries, like Spain and Japan, are developing their own stem cell
banks. But Britain has taken the lead and its bank is likely to become a prototype, if
not a resource, for the world.

The power of stem cells derives from their ability to differentiate into any type of
human cell, from liver cells to neurons - although scientists are still unable to coax
them reliably in any particular direction.

But if researchers could hone this skill, they could - for example - use stem cells
from embryos with genetic defects to understand more about the genesis of
diseases like cystic fibrosis. For patients, they could create replacement cells for
those lost to injury or in the course of a disease.

Many chronic afflictions, including diabetes, leukemia, spinal cord injury and
Parkinson's, involve the loss or destruction of a certain type of cell.

All stem cell lines used until now have been created from embryos that are the
byproduct of infertility treatments, surplus embryos from couples who had achieved
a pregnancy, or embryos that contained genetic or other defects.

Scientists like Murdoch, who study "therapeutic cloning," propose creating tailor-
made embryos to harvest genetically matched stem cells that could treat a patient's
specific condition.

The concept is anathema to U.S. conservatives.

"We recoil at the idea of growing human beings for spare body parts or creating life
for our convenience," Bush said.

But in Britain, the promise of societal good has consistently won out over the ethical
discomfort when it comes to embryo research.

Ever since Louise Brown of England became the world's first "test tube" baby more
than 30 years ago - born from an embryo implanted in her mother's womb - the
British government has been debating and regulating the use of human embryos in
medicine.

In 1990, the British government passed a law specifically allowing embryonic
research and technology, but only in a very few situations related to in vitro
fertilization or screening for genetic defects.

The government specified what types of embryos could be used and what kind of
consent was needed. Scientists were allowed to help couples screen out embryos
created by in vitro fertilization for serious genetic conditions, for example, but not to
select the gender of a child.

There is no such legal framework in the United States, where the government relies
on "guidelines" and university ethics committees to direct researchers through the
ethical maze.

A few years ago, as research in the United States began to hint at the tremendous
potential of stem cells, the British government decided to expand the scope of the
law to allow the creation of embryonic stem cell lines and therapeutic cloning as
well.

But the process is deliberate and slow. Every project is reviewed and licensed by a
government board and the fate of each embryo is carefully tracked. Every new stem
cell line must be ceded to the national bank, where it is evaluated and maintained,
and may not be transferred elsewhere without approval from a government steering
committee. Reproductive cloning - embryo manipulation to create a specific new
human being - is banned and punished with jail.

"We have to be squeaky-clean, because we're the first," said Stacey of the UK Stem
Cell Bank, standing by monitors that track every movement in the bank's labs. "We
wouldn't want these cells used inappropriately. If we made a mess of it, we'd have
pro-life groups screaming and it could affect public perception of this important
technology."

SOURCE: The International Herald Tribune, France / IHT Online
http://www.iht.com/articles/535218.html

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