Stem Cell Labs Take Private Path
A courier will hand over vials of human embryonic stem cells at a nondescript office building in Manhattan this week, where they will become research material at the newest private laboratory set up to circumvent federal limits on human embryo research.
Earlier this spring, and on the same block near the Columbia University campus, another privately funded laboratory opened. It will work with Harvard University on its newly announced plans to conduct stem cell experiments with human embryos and donor eggs.
Independent of the federal funding that normally fuels biomedical advances, these two new labs hope to spur research on effective treatments for Lou Gehrig’s disease -- amyotrophic lateral sclerosis -- and diabetes by developing human stem cells tailored to each disease.
They also want to help New York researchers keep pace with a $3-billion state-funded effort taking shape in California, said officials at two foundations that raised funds for the facilities.
Last month, human stem cell cloning experiments resumed at UC San Francisco, where researchers have raised $16 million from private donors. At the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, researchers quietly set up a private facility a year ago for experiments with stem cells from human embryos.
These projects add to mounting evidence that the Bush administration’s efforts to limit stem cell research -- intended to uphold the sanctity of the human embryo -- have spawned a growing archipelago of privately funded stem cell labs.
“We are not doing it to make a political point,” said Valerie Estess, executive director of Project ALS, which raised $800,000 to open the Project ALS/Jenifer Estess Stem Cell Laboratory here in May.
“We are trying to advance the science,” Estess said. “To not use these cells at this point would be un-American.”
In the new lab, Estess said, the foundation hopes to foster the development of human motor neurons derived from embryonic stem cells as a way to screen potential drug treatments for ALS. She said researchers also could explore the basic biology of the disease that claimed her sister’s life several years ago.
The second laboratory, set up with $1 million from the New York Stem Cell Foundation, will play a crucial role in a stem cell project, announced Tuesday at Harvard University, by cultivating donor cells from sick patients for embryo cloning research.
Researchers hope to develop stem cell lines that have specific diseases, which then could be used to explore how an illness develops and to test potential cures.
The New York Stem Cell Foundation, founded in July, is trying to foster the research technique largely out of frustration at New York’s unwillingness to allocate state money for it.
Legislators in Illinois, Ohio, Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts have committed state funding to fill the gap created by the federal policy. Connecticut recently created a $100-million fund to support stem cell research in the next decade.
But last fall, a coalition of 48 disease advocacy groups and university research centers failed for the third time to secure state funding for stem cell research in the Empire State.
To promote stem cell research in New York, the Starr Foundation last year pledged $50 million over the next three years to three biomedical research centers in the city -- Rockefeller University, Weill Medical College of Cornell University, and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.
Such private efforts are praiseworthy, but no substitute for federal funding, Estess said.
“Raising private money and pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps is all well and good,” she said. “But if we could enlist the federal government and its resources, we could solve this disease even faster.”
