Stem Cell Labs Take Private Path

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Stem Cell Labs Take Private Path

Two new facilities in New York sidestep federal limits on human

embryo research and help state scientists keep pace with others.

By Lee Hotz, Times Staff Writer

June 11, 2006

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-na-

stemcell11jun11,1,3965870.story

NEW YORK — 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 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. "