Disease specific cell lines (NEJM)

Forget "cloning." Forget "somatic cell nuclear transfer." Forget "patient specific embryonic stem cells." This week's New England Journal of Medicine's "Perspective," Susan Okie, MD (subscription required) uses the term that Irving Weissman told us about years ago: the goal is "disease specific embryonic stem cell lines."

Korea is offering a chance at never ending production of cell lines for research and poison, cosmetic and pharmacology treatment testing. And all the scientists have to do is provide private or State (rather than Federal)funding, the eggs, the donors, and give the South Koreans control.

The subject of the opinion piece is the offer from Korea to help US researchers obtain their own disease specific hESC lines:

Now, Woo Suk Hwang, the South Korean veterinarian and stem-cell biologist whose laboratory leads the world in the use of this technique, is planning to offer researchers in the United States and other countries a chance to work with such cell lines without having to make them themselves. Hwang's plan provides a possible strategy for accelerating international progress in the field and avoiding some of the legal and regulatory complications of deriving the cell lines in this country. But will U.S. scientists, ethicists, and research institutions embrace the proposal?

At the time of this writing, officials in three countries — South Korea, the United States, and the United Kingdom — were preparing to announce on October 19 the establishment of the World Stem Cell Foundation, an international consortium to be headed by Hwang and based at Seoul National University in South Korea. Under the current scheme, the consortium would operate a small satellite laboratory in the San Francisco area and another in England, and each laboratory would be associated with a nearby in vitro fertilization facility where donor oocytes would be collected. Scientists from various countries who wished to use embryonic stem cells to study a disease could apply to have cell lines created for their projects. Clinical researchers in Seoul, in England, and in San Francisco would recruit women to donate eggs and patients to donate somatic cells, after obtaining approval from the relevant oversight committees at their institutions.

Dr. Okie explains that there are no legal restrictions in most States that would prevent the research:

Under the administration's policy, federal funds may not be used for research on human embryonic stem cells created through somatic-cell nuclear transfer — which means that even if stem-cell researchers have grants from other sources, they may not conduct such studies using laboratory space, equipment, or supplies that were paid for by the National Institutes of Health. Five states — California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Rhode Island — have passed laws explicitly permitting scientists to make human embryonic stem-cell lines by somatic-cell nuclear transfer (sometimes called research cloning or therapeutic cloning). The governor of Illinois has legalized the procedure by executive order. In seven states — Arkansas, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Michigan, North Dakota, and South Dakota — research cloning is prohibited by law. Virginia may also prohibit the procedure, but the wording of its law is unclear. Only South Dakota explicitly forbids the importation of human embryonic stem cells derived elsewhere, so it appears that researchers in most states, provided that they did not use federal funds, could legally study cell lines obtained through the international consortium, according to LeRoy B. Walters of Georgetown University's Kennedy Institute of Ethics.