Watch Obama's Fine Print on Stem Cells

Today President Obama will formally announce that he is ending the Bush -era restrictions on stem-cell funding via executive order. Now comes the hard part - implementing a stem-cell policy that's meaningful, has full ethical protections and unlocks the scientific talent that's been held back the last eight years.

One insider point to watch today is whether someone from the National Institutes of Health will help explain the new funding channels for this research. It's a question of some urgency. Just last week, the NIH released a set of "challenge grant" topics that are eligible for a pool of $200 million as part of the new federal economic stimulus act. The NIH site describes the qualifying projects as those which "address specific scientific and health research challenges in biomedical and behavioral research that will benefit from significant 2-year jumpstart funds." Embryonic stem-cell research would seem a natural fit - especially since the Bush administration held it back for years - but it's not clear yet that Obama's rule change has come in time for stem-cell grant seekers to get a share of the stimulus money. That's one reason why Obama's delay in announcing changes to the stem-cell policy was a bit puzzling. Many observers - including me - expected him to lift the restrictions his first week in office.

Around research centers like the University of Chicago, stem-cell scientists are poring over such details. I just spoke with John Cunningham, M.D., a specialist in pediatric stem-cell transplantation, who directed me to the brand-new NIH list of "Highest Priority Challenge Topics." (You can see a more researcher-oriented application guide here.) Stem-cell research is on the list, but not specifically the embryonic stem-cell research that's been subject to Bush's limits. I count five topics that relate to iPS cells - short for induced pluripotent stem cells - which were discovered in 2007 and seem to have many of the properties of embryonic stem cells but are derived from adult cells. That's fantastic because iPS cells deserve more study. But embryonic stem-cell research never appears by name, except to say that "iPS cells act like embryonic stem cells."

This is an important point because as Cunningham said, "One of the things that lifting the current ban should allow us to do is really test whether iPS cells and embryonic stem cells have similar properties." In theory the current challenge grant list could include work with embryonic stem cells, since some of the topics are broad enough to encompass work with several different cell types. For example, Topic 11, "Regenerative Medicine," contains a broad opportunity to "Develop cell-based therapies for cardiovascular, lung, and blood diseases." That could cover some work with embryonic stem cells, as could some of the items under the general category of stem cells.

But none of this is set in stone. What the president says today may signal whether broader embryonic stem-cell funding will begin with the stimulus package, or whether scientists - and patients - will have to wait longer to start seeing more progress. Stay tuned.

[Note: This post also appears on the University of Chicago blog Science Life.]

Comments

[jsgaetano]

Here's some ethics we can believe in-
researchers will only be allowed to perform their scientific work with embryos which would otherwise be destroyed.

Problem solved!

I hope the intention isn't to come up with a solution the fundies can be happy with, because that's never going to happen. Those people force themselves to live in a state of continual outrage, and complain habitually.

[oustfan]

This is a topic I never really understood. Didn't Bush allow all stem cell research as long as it's from private funding? What's the problem with that? If stem cell research can result in vast medical advancements like we're told, it seems that finding investors wouldn't be a problem. Am I missing something?

[TheConsigliere]

Private firms do not to fund basic science research. From their perspective, probability of future profits is uncertain or too long-term, in relation to outlay.

If all academic research was left to private funding, we'd have seen none of the advancements of the 20th century. No medicine, no alternative energy, no internet.

[Jeremy Manier - Huffpost Blogger]

I think TheConsigliere is mostly right on this. Private firms do a lot of research, but they often depend on NIH-funded work to lead the way. And public funds are almost essential to help jumpstart a young field like this, where any payoffs could be decades away.

A good example is the publicly funded Human Genome Project, which made its information freely available to all researchers, both public and private. Data from the public project has been a boon to private companies.