The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) said on Wednesday it had approved 13 new human embryonic stem cell lines for use by federally financed researchers, with 96 more under review.
The action followed US President Barack Obama’s decision in March to expand the number of cell lines beyond those available under a policy set by former president George W. Bush, which permitted research to begin only with lines already available on Aug. 9, 2001.
EXTREME LENGTHS
Since that date, biomedical researchers supported by the NIH have had to raise private money to derive the cells, which are obtained from the fertilized embryos left over from in vitro fertility clinics.
With federal money banned from being used in any part of the work on the derived lines, researchers had to divide their laboratories and go to extreme lengths to separate research materials based on the financing source.
“You can imagine what it meant not to be able to carry a pipette from one room to another,” said Ali Brivanlou, a researcher at Rockefeller University. “They even had to repaint the walls to ensure no contamination by federal funds.”
Two of the newly approved 13 lines were derived by Brivanlou with private financing. The rest were prepared by George Daley of Children’s Hospital Boston.
READY TO GO
Daley said that private financing had been drying up and that he was eager to start research on the now-approved cell lines with the help of his federal grant money.
The director of the health institutes, Francis Collins, said he believed that most researchers would be satisfied with the outcome, even though they were still barred from deriving the cells themselves.
“I’m not sure everyone is interested in deriving their own cell lines as long as they can get lines from others,” Collins said.
BREAKTHROUGH
Researchers’ interest in human embryonic stem cells has abated since the discovery in 2007 by the Japanese biologist Shinya Yamanaka that the mature cells of the body can be reprogrammed to the embryonic state.
These induced embryonic cells are highly similar to the real thing but may not be exactly the same. One reason is that the mature cell may perceive the forced walk-back to embryonic state as unauthorized and switch on its anti-cancer defenses.
Because the reprogrammed cells and those derived from leftover human embryos may not be identical, researchers need to work with both kinds, Collins said.
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