EU stem cell funding hangs in the balance

The future of European Union funded embryonic stem cell research hangs in the balance after a heated debate at the European Parliament on Tuesday.

Members of the European Parliament debated the delicate ethical issue of whether or not to commit European Union funds to this line of scientific research as part of a broader debate on how to spend the roughly €50 billion in EU research funds over the next seven years.

MEPs also cast doubts over the European Commission’s plan to create an independent European Research Council. Some want the idea reviewed in 2008. The Commission believes this is too soon and has proposed a review in 2010.

But stem cells sparked the most intense debate. MEPs won’t vote until tomorrow (Thursday), and given the ethical questions involved, they won’t be pressured to follow any party line.

Framework Programme 7 (FP7), due to begin in January 2007, will assign roughly one percent of the overall research budget to embryonic stem cell research in countries that permit it, if the European Commission gets its way.

The Commission, the EU’s executive body, has proposed adopting the same approach to embryonic stem cell research in FP7 to the one used in the previous research budget, FP6, which was agreed in 2001.

The status quo it hopes to maintain allows stem cell research using embryos that would otherwise be destroyed, such as those created during in vitro fertilisation (IVF) treatment. The scientists would have to get approval for their research from a scientific committee, as well as two ethics committees, in order to benefit from EU funds.

And proposals for stem cell research from scientists based in countries that ban such research will not be accepted.

Stem cells 'vital'

The Commission, as well as a majority of countries in the EU, believes stem cell research is vital for a wide range of human health research, including treatments for diabetes and neurodegenerative diseases including Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases, which are on the rise across Europe’s ageing population.

 MEPs expressed widely divergent views on the issue during the debate at their plenary session in Strasbourg, including the most fundamentalist Catholic argument that continuing stem cell research would result in human egg harvesting in Europe.

 Not all religious MEPs agreed, however. John Purvis, a British Conservative MEP said that, as a Christian he believes the EU could fund research on embryonic stem cells, citing the story of the Good Samaritan from the Bible.  

 “It is wholly appropriate for the EU to fund embryonic stem cell research but it must be regulated,” he said during Tuesday’s debate.

Jerzy Buzek, a conservative MEP and former Polish prime minister, who has led the debate in the Parliament, proposed a compromise that would have permitted stem cell research but only using embryos created before a cut-off date. This is similar to the position adopted by Germany.

However, Janez Potočnik, the European commissioner in charge of research and development, who attended the debate in the Parliament, said this isn’t a good solution, according to his spokesperson Antonia Mochan.

Handful of companies

“If this restriction were imposed then there would only be a handful of companies from outside the EU that could provide researchers with the stem cells they need,” she said. The companies that have been collecting stem cells for longest are located in the United States and in Israel, she said.

“Companies in the EU are working with newer lines,” she said. “Setting a cut off date would restrict scientists from using these newer lines. This isn’t the answer,” she said. The older cell lines are unsuitable for human therapeutic use as in general they were raised on substrates that included mouse feeder cells.

There are sharply divergent views about stem cell research among the 25 member states of the Union, as well as among individual MEPs.

Italy, Austria, Germany, Luxembourg, Malta, Poland and Slovakia all signed an ethics declaration last November, promising to block the EU from continuing with this approach to stem cell research. The seven countries acting together could veto any decision to continue permitting stem cell research.

However, Fabio Mussi, Italy’s new University and Research Minister this week said he would remove his country from the group. Without Italy, the six remaining countries wouldn’t have enough votes to block the research.

“Italy’s change of position is significant in that it denies this group of countries the power of veto, but we don’t know for sure if they would have used that power,” said Mochan.

Commissioner Potočnik was confident of securing broad support for his plans for FP7 after Tuesday’s debate in the Parliament. “He felt it was a serious debate and that everyone wants broadly the same thing,” Mochan said.

“Clearly we are not 100 per cent in line on all details but the issues of difference are not so damaging that they could undermine the whole package,” she added.

Concerning the specific vote on embryonic stem cell research, she declined to predict the outcome of the debate. “I wouldn’t want to call it,” she said.

But if opponents of stem cell research prevail on Thursday, she said “it would be a potential setback in a lot of areas of human health research.”