Question
To ask Her Majesty's Government further to the Written Answers by Lord Drayson on 20 April (WA 329–30), whether the Medical Research Council (MRC) is responsible for funding research worldwide with induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) and stem cells derived by nuclear transfer, such that a worldwide search would be necessary to address the outcomes of research funded by the MRC.
Answer
The Medical Research Council (MRC) primarily supports research based within the UK. However, a large proportion of the scientists supported by the MRC have extensive national and international collaborations. In stem cell research there are examples of major international joint funding initiatives such as the new partnership between the MRC and the Californian Institute of Regenerative Medicine which aims to support collaboration between scientists in the UK and California. This high level of collaboration results in the production of many research papers worldwide based directly or indirectly on MRC support. There is frequently a significant time lag between the provision of funding to projects and research publications arising from those projects. The consistent classification of research papers with a primary or significant focus on embryonic, as opposed to other stem cell approaches, requires a careful analysis of the contents of the papers in question. Management information held by the MRC, and extensive datasets such as PubMed, BiomedExpert.com, Faculty of 1000, and Thompson ISI, cannot therefore reliably identify all papers with this research focus without trained scrutiny of the results. A simple counting of research papers is not a reliable measure of output without information about the quality of these publications. Analysis of the citation rate of research papers, normalised by research field, is an established approach to measuring the impact of publications. This analysis relies on data about citations having accumulated over several years. At present the MRC supports almost 200 programmes relating to stem cell research. Therefore currently such information could be obtained only at disproportionate cost.