Stem cell research tops Obama agenda

The vast majority of emails I send to scientists and academics inviting them to sign Declan’s petition to the UN on research cloning of embryos and stem cells are still being dumped to spam boxes (or to cyberspace, see blog of 4 September “Obama: Yes to stem cells, funding”). On Monday I sent 198 emails - mainly to Scotland and California because in Sunday’s blog I referred to the MRC Centre for Regenerative Medicine of Edinburgh University and the Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine in San Diego – but only received ten out-of-office autoreplies, and not unsurprisingly just one signature. Yesterday I sent 128 emails, mainly to California, which yielded two autoreplies, and no signatures.

Also yesterday, The Big Issue Head Office – The Big Issue is a magazine sold by homeless people throughout the UK on registered street pitches – advised Declan that our pitches are in effect terminated (as soon as it has been confirmed by Office staff that we did not purchase a minimum of 40 magazines each week for the four weeks commenced 6 October, we will no longer be able to have a registered pitch), despite his complaint the previous day to the chair of The Big Issue Foundation (see previous blog). This is an extremely serious situation for me in particular, in that I am facing possible prosecution for begging.

Then last night, as we were bedding down, just to add insult to injury, I suppose, two guys entertained themselves on their skateboards above us for some twenty minutes – since 7 September we have been sleeping tucked away, about twenty paces from the side entrance of a building, down some twelve steps (prior to that we slept for almost two years in a porch). The last time some guys partied in the enclosure, on 9 September, we decided to sleep somewhere else the following night and I was arrested because I refused to be moved on as result of having nowhere else to sleep (see blog of 11 September “I am arrested for breach of the peace”). The road is described as a “quiet thoroughfare” by the company that owns the building. Oh, well.



Barely a week since his election victory, US President-elect Barack Obama is bringing joy to long-suffering stem cell researchers. For years, US progress has been crippled by restrictions introduced in August 2001 by President George W Bush, preventing federally funded researchers from working on all but a few sources of embryonic stem cells - the cells from embryos with huge medical potential for repairing organs and tissues. Now, those restrictions will be among the first of Bush’s executive orders to be swept away, probably within the next 100 days, said New Scientist. The news emerged on Sunday from an interview on Fox News featuring John Podesta, the head of Obama’s “transition team”, which is managing the switch to power.

“There’s a lot that the president can do using his executive authority without waiting for congressional action, and I think we’ll see the president do that,” said Podesta, a former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton. According to New Scientist, the aim is to quickly dismantle the legacies of the Bush era that Obama sees as holding back progress, particularly those motivated by ideology or religion. Bush’s resistance to stem cell research, for example, is a concession to evangelical conservatives who oppose all research on embryos. “I think across the board, on stem cell research, on a number of areas, you see the Bush administration even today moving aggressively to do things that I think are probably not in the interest of the country,” said Podesta.

The news was greeted with delight by researchers who have long criticised the Bush restrictions. “Hallelujah - at last,” Robert Lanza, chief scientist at Advanced Cell Technology in Massachusetts (and a signatory of Declan’s petition), told New Scientist. He added: “This represents the end of a sad chapter in American scientific history. Under an Obama administration, money will hopefully flow to all promising avenues of research based on scientific merit, and not skewed to fit a conservative agenda. We’ve been operating for the past decade with one hand tied behind our back” (Coghlan, New Scientist, 12/11).

The Union-Tribune quotes Joe Panetta, executive director of San Diego’s Biocom, an association representing the local biotech industry. “I’m feeling very positive about some of the things we’ve seen and heard about Obama’s plans to increase funding for basic research,” Panetta said. He added that a number of local biotech firms depend on federal funds for research, largely distributed through the National Institutes of Health. Federal support of stem cell research would also aid the Burnham, Scripps and Salk research institutes (of the Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine). Although California has enacted its own $3 billion stem cell research program, under current federal regulations, embryonic research must be conducted separately from federally funded research. “That’s an incredible nightmare in logistics and operations,” Panetta said. “It would be great to see the rules loosening” (Calbreath, The Union-Tribune, 9/11).

According to Reuters, a reversal of President Bush’s long-standing policy would give a boost to companies seeking to develop therapies based on stem cell research. Several stem cell focused companies reported positive developments on Monday. Geron Corp said its potential HIV treatment, TAT2, had promising preclinical data, while biotech giant Celgene Corp got a regulatory nod to go ahead with human trials of its experimental stem cell therapy for the treatment of Crohn’s disease. “We will see more and more of these events just given the fact that there is more and more path for the commercialisation of stem cells – adult, placental, umbilical and now, more embryonic,” WBB Securities analyst Steve Brozak said. Shares of Geron were up as much as 16 percent, while StemCells’ shares soared 42 percent. Both stocks have risen significantly over the last one month. Other smaller players in the field also benefited (Dey, Reuters, 10/11).

Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan of Mexico, who acts as the Vatican health minister, said that stem cells taken from human embryos and involving the destruction of the embryos “serve no purpose”, reports The Times yesterday under the headline “Vatican fires off warning to Barack Obama over stem cell research”. Asked whether the Vatican was concerned about reports that Mr Obama might reverse the Bush Administration’s ban, the cardinal said that embryonic stem cell research had not resulted in any significant health cure so far and was “good for nothing”. Research on adult stem cells and umbilical cords had been shown to have “positive value”, by contrast, although even that was not “a panacea for everything”. He said the Vatican would seek clarification of the new administration’s position on stem cells, and he himself was not “fully aware” what it was (Owen, The Times, 11/11).

Our campaign in support of embryonic stem cell research and therapeutic cloning, also known as somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), will argue that stem cell research, including human embryonic stem (hES) cell research, is vital to advancing regenerative medicine. According to a 2006 US Department of Health & Human Services report, a conservative estimate of the worldwide market for regenerative medicine by 2010 is $500 billion (the projected US market is $100 billion). We will also argue that advancements in hES cell research have the potential to be an economic boon for countries throughout the world and to lower overall domestic health care costs, which in the US alone are in excess of $2 trillion annually (16 percent of US Gross Domestic Product). With reference to the United States, we will further argue that ill-considered interventions at a state level that replace rational regulation with restrictions based on ideology undercut a peer-governed competitive national system for funding biomedical research that has been a fundamental policy and programmatic triumph for the United States (see blog of 3 November “State Stem Cell Policies Deserve National Attention”).

In fact, we believe that NAC will be in a position to be a leading Vatican watchdog regarding ES cell research and SCNT. We are well aware of the Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Community (COMECE), for example, which has a permanent Secretariat in Brussels. The COMECE secretariat monitors and analyses current developments in research policy, biotechnology and bioethics at the European Union level, according to its website.