The Burrill Report


Federal funding for embryonic stem cell research will continue while the government appeals a lower court injunction that would ban such financing. The ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington overturns U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth’s August ruling that all funding should be suspended while its legality is challenged in the courts.

“President Obama made expansion of stem cell research and the pursuit of groundbreaking treatments and cures a top priority when he took office,” said Robert Gibbs, Obama’s press secretary, in a statement. “We’re heartened that the court will allow NIH and their grantees to continue moving forward while the appeal is resolved.”

The Obama administration challenged the lower court’s decision and could ultimately have to turn to Congress to rewrite the law to be clearer on the issue. At issue is Judge Lamberth’s decision in a case brought by two researchers who work with reprogrammed adult stem cells and oppose the use of embryonic cells.

In his ruling, published August 23, Judge Lamberth determined that all that all human embryonic stem cell research is research in which a human embryo is destroyed and is therefore prohibited by the Dickey-Wicker Amendment, a 1995 law that prohibited using federal funds to create human embryos for research purposes or for research in which human embryos are destroyed, discarded, or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death greater than that allowed for research on fetuses in utero.

The decision overturned guidelines crafted by the Obama administration to fund such work and immediately spread fear that it would disrupt many research programs. “The decision is a deplorable brake on all stem cell research,” said Alan Trounson, president of CIRM, the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine, which was established in 2004 by California voters to independently fund embryonic stem cell research. “Many discoveries with other cell types, notably the so-called reprogrammed iPS cells, would not happen without ongoing research in human embryonic stem cells,” he said in a statement.

Research using human embryonic stem cell lines created with private funding was made eligible for federal funding under new National Institutes of Health guidelines and an executive order from President Barack Obama in 2009. That order had reversed limits enacted by George W. Bush confining federal funding to projects using stem cell lines created before August 2001.

The new policy relieved researchers from having to silo federal and non-federal research into different operations, a burden that limited collaboration and necessitated the purchase of duplicative lab equipment.

The Biotechnology Industry Organization applauded the Appeals Court action and plans to file an amicus brief to support the government’s position. “Patients are waiting for new therapies, and possibly even cures, that could result from embryonic stem cell research,” said BIO in a statement following the court’s suspension of the ban on federal funding. “We need to ensure that researchers in labs across the country are able to explore all promising avenues of stem cell research without fear that federal funding could again be suddenly halted.”





September 30, 2010
http://www.burrillreport.com/article-embryonic_stem_cell_research_funding_gets_a_reprieve.html