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 * * * ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: mailto:[log in to unmask] In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn