NIH lifts restrictions on fetal tissue research

doi:10.1126/science.372.6540.329

GSTDTAP > 气候变化

DOI	10.1126/science.372.6540.329
	NIH lifts restrictions on fetal tissue research
	Kelly Servick
	2021-04-23
发表期刊	Science
出版年	2021
英文摘要	Researchers who rely on fetal tissue from elective abortions to study human development and disease may now be able to resume work recently stalled by restrictive federal policies. President Joe Biden's administration last week lifted a ban on such studies by researchers within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and eliminated an ethical review board that had torpedoed funding applications from external researchers. “I would call it a very welcome return to a socially responsible approach to the use of fetal tissue in research,” says Alta Charo, a professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The previous policy, announced in June 2019 during then-President Donald Trump's administration, prohibited NIH's in-house scientists from working with human fetal tissue from abortions, which would otherwise be discarded ( Science , 14 June 2019, p. [1016][1]). The policy also created new hurdles for extramural applicants, including review by an ethics advisory board. That panel was dominated by scientists and ethicists who oppose abortion, and in August 2020, it rejected all but one of 14 applications that scientific reviewers had already deemed worthy of funding. “It was a farce,” says Lawrence Goldstein, a neuroscientist at the University of California (UC), San Diego, and the only member of the advisory board who has spoken out for fetal tissue research. “Highly valuable projects that had been through multiple levels of review already … went to this board to die.” Under the policy change released last week, the board will not convene again. And intramural NIH research involving fetal tissue can resume, an agency spokesperson confirmed. Still in place is a longstanding requirement for getting informed consent from women who donate tissue and a prohibition on financial incentives for donors and clinics that collect tissue. The tissue has been vital to studies of neurological and infectious diseases and for understanding normal fetal development. Although scientists can model development and disease with other types of cells, fetal tissue is still needed for comparison to validate those models, researchers say. “Humanized mice” containing transplants of fetal tissue can model the human immune system and can be used to test potential treatments for diseases, including COVID-19. The International Society for Stem Cell Research called the reversal a “return to evidence-based policymaking”—though some Trump-era requirements for justifying the use of fetal tissue in grant applications remain, notes Sean Morrison, chair of the society's public policy committee. To groups that oppose the use of fetal tissue in labs, however, the remaining restrictions aren't enough. “This reflects a turn to poor ethics as well as poor science,” says David Prentice, vice president and research director of the antiabortion Charlotte Lozier Institute who served on the now-disbanded ethics review board. For some scientists, the change offers a way forward. Stem cell biologist Hanna Mikkola of UC Los Angeles (UCLA), who studies how blood stem cells emerge during development, had NIH funding for studies with a human fetal tissue component for more than 10 years. But last summer, the new ethical review board recommended against funding a proposal she submitted in August 2019 to map human blood stem cell development. Mikkola has continued her work with bridge funding from UCLA, but she hasn't hired new postdocs because she couldn't guarantee she'd be able to keep paying their salaries. She is waiting to hear whether NIH will now approve the stalled funding for her work, which could lead to treatments for blood cancers and other disorders. “This is the question I wanted to answer the last 15 years, and now we're getting so close,” she says. “We can't stop now.” [1]: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/364/6445/1016
领域	气候变化 ; 资源环境
URL	查看原文
引用统计
文献类型	期刊论文
条目标识符	http://119.78.100.173/C666/handle/2XK7JSWQ/324053
专题	气候变化资源环境科学
推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714	Kelly Servick. NIH lifts restrictions on fetal tissue research[J]. Science,2021.
APA	Kelly Servick.(2021).NIH lifts restrictions on fetal tissue research.Science.
MLA	Kelly Servick."NIH lifts restrictions on fetal tissue research".Science (2021).