Question
To ask Her Majesty’s Government, further to the Written Answers by Lord Young of Norwood Green on 7 April 2010 (WA 433–34), what assessment the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) has made of ongoing advances with induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells compared with attempts to acquire human embryonic stem cells by cloning; what is the correlation between the number of research publications describing the use of human stem cells derived by either direct reprogramming or nuclear transfer and the total funds to date provided by the Medical Research Council for each of these two approaches; and which non-reproductive applications would benefit from nuclear transfer that could not be addressed by the use of iPS cells.
Answer
The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) has advised that it maintains a Scientific and Clinical Advances Advisory Committee, which regularly reviews research regarding the creation of human embryonic stem cells or embryonic-like stem cells, including induced pluripotent stem cells. The most recent meeting at which the committee considered this issue took place on 9 September 2010. The minutes of this meeting are available on the authority's website. The Government do not routinely collate or analyse information on the total number of research publications worldwide on approaches used in stem cell research, including induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) or embryo-derived stem cells. However, details of current published medical research are available on UK PubMed Central and on the US website PubMed Central. The Medical Research Council (MRC) is funded by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and is one of the main agencies through which the Government support biomedical research. The MRC supports research into all approaches to harness the potential of stem cells to treat human disease. While the MRC has not yet awarded any proposals to pursue the induced pluripotent stem cell approach to treat human disease, three projects that directly related to efforts to reprogramme differentiated adult stem cells have been supported. The total value of these awards is £4.2 million. The MRC has supported one project relating to human somatic cell nuclear transfer, and the value of this award was £500,000. It is not evident at present which area of stem cell research may deliver the most effective treatments for particular conditions and more research is needed on all types of stem cells to determine which routes should be pursued in the development of cell-based therapies. In June 2010 the MRC and the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine held a workshop to examine human somatic cell nuclear transfer and its role in stem cell research. Participants, who included preeminent international experts, discussed the range of stem cell technologies and concluded that it was unclear at present which would be more useful for therapeutic development, and that the answer may differ for different disorders. The report of this workshop summarising the state of the global research effort in this area and providing more detail is available on the MRC website at http://www.mrc.ac.uk/Utilities/Documentrecord/index. htm?d=MRC007577.