TR Editors' blog: nih - Technology Review

NIH Halts All Internal Embryonic Stem-Cell Research

The federal agency makes an unprecedented decision in response to last week's federal injunction.

Emily Singer 08/30/2010

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The National Institutes of Health, the nation's largest biomedical funding agency, halted all ongoing research at the agency that involves human embryonic stem cells. The order comes in response to a federal injunction issued last week blocking use of federal funding for the research. (See my story, New Court Ruling Could Cripple Stem-Cell Research, for more details.)

According to Science Insider:

According to a furious NIH staffer who read the e-mail to ScienceInsider over the telephone, this morning's message from NIH intramural research chief Michael Gottesman states: "HHS [the Department of Health and Human Services] has determined that the recent preliminary injunction ... is applicable to the use of human embryonic stem cells in intramural research projects. In light of this determination, effective today, intramural scientists who use human ES cell lines should initiate procedures to terminate these projects. Procedures that will conserve and protect the research resources should be followed."
The agency has eight research projects that use hESCs, most if not all of which use lines approved under the Bush Administration, say NIH officials. It also has a unit that characterizes lines added to the NIH registry of approved hESC lines.
The shutdown is the first immediate halt to research since Lamberth issued the preliminary injunction. NIH Director Francis Collins has said that extramural researchers can continue their projects for now and that the injunction will affect only future grant payments. ("Intramural" means researchers in labs on the NIH campus; "extramural" refers to researchers at universities and other outside institutions who receive NIH grants.)But some biomedical research lobbyists worry that that interpretation of the ruling may have been too optimistic, and a shutdown of all ongoing NIH-funded hESC research could be imminent.
The Department of Justice is expected to ask the courts to stay the injunction as soon as today, an NIH source tells ScienceInsider.

New Stem Cell Lines Eligible for Federal Funding

For hundreds of scientists, embryonic stem cell research takes a step into the present.

Emily Singer 12/02/2009

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The National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced today that 13 new embryonic stem cell lines are now eligible for federal funding. That means that scientists with NIH grants can study embryonic stem cells derived using newer, more refined methods generally considered to be superior to the older ones. Ninety-six additional lines are also now under review.

"Those were early days in the science of stem cell research, and much has been learned since then," said NIH director Francis Collins in a press conference on Wednesday, referring to the stem cell lines, created before 2001, that had previously been eligible for federal funding. "In the last eight years, hundreds of embryonic stem cell lines have been derived using non-federal funds, many of them carrying more favorable characteristics."

As I wrote in a previous story:

Using only the old lines is like "being required to use Microsoft Word 1998," says Jeanne Loring, director of the Center for Regenerative Medicine at the Scripps Research Institute, in La Jolla, CA.

The earlier lines were derived using animal products, making them largely unfit for therapeutic use. "There are hundreds of embryonic stem-cell lines out there that have been made under the best conditions, and some of them are patient ready," says John Gearhart, director of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia. "They have greater utility, performance, and safety than [the Bush-approved] lines."

The announcement follows President Obama's executive order made last March, enabling government support for embryonic stem cell research. That order overturned a previous one by President Bush in 2001, limiting federally-funded research to a set of existing cell lines. The 2001 decree forced scientists who wanted to create and use new stem cell lines, derived from leftover IVF embryos, to garner private funding.

Eleven of the 13 new lines were generated in George Daley's lab at Children's Hospital, in Boston, which used private funding to make them. According to the New York Times, "Dr. Daley said that private financing had been drying up and that he was eager to start research on the now-approved cell lines with the help of his federal grant money." Researchers still cannot derive new lines using federal funds--creating new lines requires the destruction of an embryo.

What Physics Can Teach Us About Cancer

The National Cancer Institute launched 12 physical science-oncology centers.

Katherine Bourzac 10/27/2009

Today the National Cancer Institute announced that it has awarded grants to twelve institutions to apply the tools and methods of the physical sciences to cancer research. The Physical Science-Oncology Centers will be at sites including MIT, Cornell, Arizona State, and Johns Hopkins. A full list of the centers with links to explain the research focus of each is available here.

This approach to cancer biology is one that TR has been following. One of the primary approaches being pursued by these centers involves applying the measurement tools of engineering and materials science to the study of cancer cells. In recent years, researchers have pulled on cells with the tips of atomic-force microscopes, squeezed them between plates, and applied other physical methods, and found, for example, that cancer cells have a different stiffness than healthy ones. They have also discovered that a cell's physical environment can affect its behavior just as much as its chemical environment.

According to the Institute, another main line of research will be "Information Coding-Decoding-Transfer and Translation in Cancer." This is a bit convoluted but essentially refers to systems biology. As I wrote in this article about the field's founder:

"Systems biology takes a cue from engineering and treats organisms as complex systems. Systems biologists, often using computer models, try to understand how genes, proteins, cells, and tissues interact to create complex organisms. By mapping out, rather than reducing, biological complexity, systems biologists hope to reach a new understanding of the fundamental processes of life, from embryonic development to normal metabolism to the emergence of diseases like cancer."