Print“There's no question that these state programs drew a lot of scientists into the field.”
Restriction on federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research sparked several states to establish programs to fund this work, but a new study finds that while state programs now fund a majority of human embryonic stem cell research conducted in the United States, fewer than a fifth of state grants are going to projects considered ineligible under federal rules.
Six states—California, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, and New York—established stem cell funding programs in the wake of the Bush Administration prohibitions. Researchers at Georgia Tech, who created a searchable database of state-funded stem cell research at www.stemcellstates.net, found from December 2005 to the end of 2009, six states awarded nearly 750 grants totaling about $1.3 billion. Research grants and support for scientific infrastructure account for 90 percent of all state funding.
“Only a subset of grants for hESC research supported science that was clearly ineligible for NIH funding during the Bush Administration,” the researchers say in an article of the December issue of Nature Biotechnology. “California and Connecticut focused the most on this sort of research—which typically involved the derivation of new hESC lines of the use of newer unapproved cell lines—but even in these states fewer than a fifth of grants went to clearly ineligible research.”
The reason is not clear, but the authors suggest it may be that scientists wishing to pursue such research were unable to access the raw material or acquire intellectual property rights needed to do so. It may also be that scientists were interested in other possible alternatives to human embryonic stem cells such as induced pluripotent stem cells. Last, they say, scientist may have thought by working with established human embryonic stem cell lines their work would have greater credibility.
There is great variance in the extent to which the six states fund human embryonic stem cell research. California devoted 97 percent of its grants and Connecticut 75 percent to this research. By contrast, New Jersey and New York each directed just 21 percent of their funding to the area.
The study also suggests that one effect of these state programs has been to motivate scientists who otherwise would not conduct stem cell research to do so. The researchers found that while most scientists getting state stem cell grants had received NIH funding, a large number of them had not received NIH funding for stem cell research. This ranged from 41 percent of scientists in California getting grants to 71 percent in Maryland.
“There's no question that these state programs drew a lot of scientists into the field,” says Aaron Levine, assistant professor at Georgia Tech and one of the authors of the study. “An interesting question going forward is how committed these scientists are to stem cell research or if they are relating their work to stem cells now simply to be eligible for state funding – that's unknown right now.”
December 10, 2010
http://www.burrillreport.com/article-states_now_fund_majority_of_human_embryonic_stem_cell_research.html
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