Washington

Scientists and policy-makers from around the world were this week set to lay the foundations of an international collaboration in human stem-cell research.

Representatives from the United States, Canada, Australia, Singapore, Finland, Sweden and Israel were due to meet in London as Nature went to press at the invitation of George Radda, chief executive of Britain's Medical Research Council, to discuss ways to hasten the development of any therapies that might result from stem-cell research.

Supporters say that what they term a 'human stem-cell project' would help to ensure that scientists from countries where such research is restricted could still contribute to this emerging field of biology.

Rules for research using human embryonic stem cells vary around the world. In particular, there are divergent approaches to the derivation of new stem cell lines — a procedure that is politically controversial as it involves the use of human embryos for research purposes.

In the United States, researchers are not allowed to use federal funds to derive and study new stem-cell lines, and in Germany, the derivation of new lines is forbidden by law. Meanwhile, scientists in the United Kingdom, Israel and Singapore can create and work on new stem-cell lines.

Roger Pedersen, a developmental biologist who in 2001 left the University of California, San Francisco, for the University of Cambridge, UK, says that he expects the international consortium to help researchers to contribute to stem-cell research while abiding with this patchwork of laws.

“It would be realistic to expect that novel embryonic stem-cell lines would be derived in the United Kingdom, Sweden and Singapore, and that US efforts would tend to focus on understanding how to control the in vitro differentiation of existing human embryonic stem-cell lines,” Pedersen says. He adds that the international consortium is expected to lay out its goals in a series of meetings during the first half of this year.

An international stem-cell consortium could prove politically sensitive, and Radda's staff said that he couldn't comment on the planned meeting. But policy-makers initially seemed to welcome the idea.

For example, James Battey, head of the stem-cell task force at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), says that a central coordinating body could do much to advance stem-cell research around the world. He was planning to attend this week's meeting on behalf of the NIH. “By exploiting the strengths of what's possible in each country, maybe we'll be better able to move the science forward,” Battey says.