UW-Madison’s Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation is one of 11 laboratories owning stem cells lines that qualify for federal funding, the National Institute of Health announced Wednesday.
WARF owns five of the 72 stem cell lines the NIH said are available for federal funding worldwide. The announcement is expected to spark a flurry of funding requests.
Discovered and patented in 1998 by UW researcher James Thomson, WARF is at the forefront of stem-cell technology, even in its competition with the 10 other labs.
“We are the only ones who have come to any agreement with NIH,” WARF spokesman Andrew Cohn said. “I think that means we’re still pretty much in the forefront.”
In August President Bush announced only stem-cell lines created before his speech that were made from embryos created for reproductive purposes and discarded by consenting parents would qualify for federal funding.
Thomson’s discovery, controversial because it required the destruction of the human embryo, was a breakthrough in modern science. The undifferentiated cells were caught before becoming specialized. Therefore, with the right triggering methods, they could potentially become any number of the 200-plus known human cells.
In September, WARF came to an agreement with NIH to allow these cells to be distributed to qualified researchers under the WARF patent. The agreement also allows the researchers who make subsequent discoveries to keep the patent for those discoveries.
The other 10 labs have yet to come to the same agreement with NIH.
“A number of other providers are unwilling to provide cells to researchers,” Cohn said. “NIH has been trying to negotiate agreements with them, and they haven’t.”
The agreement with NIH complies with WARF’s mission as a private foundation, Cohn said.
“We don’t have any shareholders,” he said.
Furthermore, Cohn said, WARF’s stem-cell lines are the only ones deemed as “Golden Standard,” which means they have been published and available for more than two years.
So far, WARF has received over 215 requests for stem-cell lines, and Cohn said they expect more as soon as negotiations between individual researchers and NIH for federal funding are worked out.
