A court injunction barring federal funds from being used on stem cell research could catapult California back into the leading edge of research.
That’s because state voters established their own stem cell research fund in 2004 with the passage of proposition 71.
About 35 percent of the $200 million in federal funds set aside for stem cell research grants this year haven’t yet been awarded and are now in legal limbo (more…)
By Marci Greenstein
National Institutes of Health chief, Dr. Frances Collins was talking up his agency’s partnership with the Food and Drug Administration on NPR’s Diane Rehm Show last week. The move is intended to speed up the process for getting drugs from laboratories to the marketplace. What’s surprising is that this collaboration hasn’t happened sooner. How often have we heard about patients desperate to get drugs that are successful in clinical trials but are moving at a snail’s pace through the FDA’s regulatory maze? (more…)
Barack Obama has said that the National Institutes of Health may approve the use of about 700 embryonic stem cell lines for research if the stem cells were obtained ethically, reports the Washington Post’s Shankar Vedantam. There are clear parameters for what is an ethical procedure like that the embryo was destroyed after an in vitro fertilization and donors gave their consent to use the lines for scientific research. But, ultimately, what stem cell lines can be used is up to NIH: Obama has empowered scientists to figure out what lines should be used to research illnesses. His trust of bureaucratic scientists on this touchy political issue is a welcome break from the Bush administration.-MB
