At a press conference today, April 26, attended by U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy G. Thompson, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation announced two licensing agreements regarding human embryonic stem cells in research:

— WARF has signed a license agreement with ES Cell International, with offices in Singapore and Melbourne, Australia, enabling ES to distribute human embryonic stem cells worldwide for use in research. This is the first license agreement WARF has signed with a commercial provider listed on the National Institutes of Health Stem Cell Registry.

— WARF signed a separate license agreement enabling the University of California-San Francisco to distribute human embryonic stem cells worldwide for use in research. This is the first license agreement WARF has signed with an academic provider listed on the NIH registry.

“It is WARF’s goal to enable scientists’ access to a wide variety of cells to move embryonic stem cell discovery forward as fast as possible. Only by increasing the number of scientists working in this field will these researchers bring the tomorrow of medicine closer to today,” said Carl Gulbrandsen, managing director of WARF.