The legal battle over whether taxpayer dollars can go toward human embryonic stem cells research continues to drag on, but the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) is not waiting for a final court decision before adding new cell lines to its list of those eligible for financial backing.

In August, a federal district judge issued a preliminary injunction against federally funded studies using such cells. But the nine-member working group tasked with determining whether embryonic stem cell lines are scientifically and ethically appropriate for federal backing has been “moving forward with our regular reviews” ever since an appeals court suspended the injunction in September, says the panel's chair Jeffrey Botkin, a medical ethicist from the University of Utah School of Medicine in Salt Lake City.

On 9 December, the advisory committee to NIH director Francis Collins voted in agreement with the working group and approved four new lines from India and Sweden. These include two lines from the Swedish biotech firm Cellartis that had previously been eligible for funding under former US President George W. Bush but had to reapply under the new administration's rules. The panel rejected five other cell lines derived at health centers in Houston and Chicago, citing a lack of adequate informed consent, and deferred its decision regarding six lines from Guangzhou Medical University in China until expert native speakers of Chinese could weigh in on the wording used in the consent forms.

Collins himself now has the final say on which cell lines are eligible for funding. (His decision was still pending as Nature Medicine went to press.) If the four lines receive his blessing, it will bring the total number eligible for NIH funding up to 86 since the first approvals were made in December 2009.

Of the 82 lines currently on the registry, seven have been added since the August injunction was handed down. All of these cell lines met the new strict guidelines for informed consent and thereby passed a simple administrative review without requiring the working group's input.

Sean Tipton, president of the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research, which filed an amicus brief in support of the government's appeal of the August injunction, applauds the NIH staff for moving ahead with the agency's registry despite the ongoing legal uncertainties. “The litigation has a chilling effect on the field, but the work has to go on,” he says. “We expect to prevail in the end, and you would hate to have lost the years of progress until that finally happens.”