Free stem cells for all?
Free stem cells for all? Possibly, now that the US Patent and Trademark Office is re-examining key patents on human embryonic stem cells (ESCs) that some say have been stifling stem cell research.
The first lines of human ESCs were grown by James Thomson at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1998. Since then, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, which manages the university's intellectual property, has charged biotechnology firms licence fees running to hundreds of thousands of dollars for permission to use Wisconsin's ESCs or the methods Thomson used to grow them. Even academics once had to pay up to $5000 to use the cells, though the charge has dropped to $500.
Jeanne Loring, a biologist at the Burnham Institute in La Jolla, California, claims that when Thomson grew the cells he used methods known to work for other mammals. She has filed a statement backing a challenge to the patents brought by the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, based in Santa Monica, California, and the Public Patent Foundation in New York.
