Fiona Watt, President of the International Society for Stem Cell Research

In June, Fiona Watt of Cancer Research UK's Cambridge laboratory became the fifth president of the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR). This is the first time the society has been led by a woman, by a researcher based in Europe, and by a scientist who researches skin. Nature Reports Stem Cells spoke with her about her work and her views on the future of the society and of stem cell research.

What was your first role in ISSCR?

Len Zon [the first president of ISSCR] and I were co-organizing a Keystone Conference a few years back. Len told me he had this idea for launching a new stem cell society and having big meetings. And I told him, “I don't think this is a good idea, Len.”

What do you think now?

The attendance [at the ISSCR meeting] in Philadelphia was 2,800. That's an awful lot starting from zero not too long ago. It's a bit like a snowball coming down the hill and as we pick up momentum we are gathering people from a broad spectrum.

Another analogy is to think of stem cell biology as like a vacuum cleaner, we sort of hoover up most disciplines in science, but we maintain the momentum, we gather in diverse people but keep the core focus on rigorous science and benefit to patients.

What advice do you have for people entering the field?

The job market at present for people who want to start their own labs is really pretty buoyant internationally. The caveat is that you have to be planning your research with an eye to the long term.

“Some of the things that people are excited about are really technologies rather than big questions. I don't think it's enough to be simply making iPS cells.”

I don't think it's enough to be simply making induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells). Some of the things that people are excited about are really technologies rather than big questions. If you are setting up your lab, you need to be thinking about what you want to be in the longer term and not be caught up in the flurry of whatever happens to be novel at the moment.

What expertise do you see building up?

One of the interesting issues is bioinformatics and computational biology. I think that it's important to recognize that people who are very skilled in bioinformatics are not going to be satisfied with simply providing a service for the rest of the stem cell community.

I was talking to a bioinformatician recently who said stem cell biologists are more at the data-generation stage than the analysis stage. Thoughts?

Speaking from my own lab, we are just waking up to the fact that we are sitting on a gold mine of information that requires looking across data sets rather than tackling each data set. We're starting to do that, but we need a lot of help. We need to be told what can or can't be done. The bioinformatician I was talking with today needed to be reassured that I'm not really that interested in a p value of zero point zero zero zero zero. I want to know if something changed a lot or a little because biologically that's what might be important. It's great fun educating one another on what we can achieve. Until you try to have these discussions you don't know what it is you don't know.

Isn't it hard to manage collaborations?

In my experience, collaborations only work if you get on well on a personal level and if you realize what it is you don't know. So you have a mutual and equal appreciation of one another with well set out objectives. With postdocs and students you want to get them talking to each other and discussing these issues long before a paper's on the horizon.

What technical tool would be most useful to move the stem cell field forward?

A good way of tracking the behaviours of individual cells in a living mouse. We tend to get quite a static picture of what is happening within the tissue unless we can visualize the way cells move and interact with one another. I think being able to look at what your stem cells are doing has to be important for everybody. If you've differentiated them in a culture dish and then implanted them into an animal model, you'd like to see what they are up to.

What can skin teach you about other systems and in what ways is skin unique?

Skin is one of the classic tissues in which people recognized many decades ago that there must be a stem cell population because the most differentiated cells are dead. So if you compare skin with the blood, one of the other classic systems, the difference is that in skin, the physical location of the stem cells and their progeny is constrained. You think about neighbouring cells, extracellular matrix, secreted factors, physical forces. All that's easy to analyse in the skin.

It's a parallel with some of the beautiful Drosophila work where looking at the physical relationships between stem cells and their progeny gives you insights into how the cells communicate with each other.

What about therapeutic applications?

For the skin we have the ability to grow cells from normal human skin, expand them in culture, and graft them back onto the person they came from. The paper that really showed that these cells could be grown at clonal density and repopulate the epidermis1 was published in 1975; less than ten years later, this was being used to treat patients2.

There were some biotech companies launched on the basis of that work, but by and large they didn't prosper. This was where the issue of profit became apparent. You can make more money from a large number of people who are not very sick than from a small number of extremely sick people. It provides a reality check for people who are merrily making cardiac tissue from embryonic stem (ES) cells and are thinking they will build a new heart.

What lessons does that hold for the stem-cell community?

Scientists make the original discovery, but you have to be pretty special to get it to patients. You're not going to be publishing much in the peer-reviewed literature while you're trying to do that.

There were difficulties with simple things. If you put the graft of the epidermal sheet upside down, with the dead cells on the bottom and the stem cells sticking up, it's not going to work. In Britain, one clinical trial had to be abandoned because the ambulance drivers went on strike and the patients couldn't be brought to hospital for treatment. Some of the most successful trials happened in a French military hospital, where the surgeon in charge was also in charge of the staff in military terms. You have to get buy-in across the board.

It seems that the ISSCR's mandate is expanding, with plans to build a registry of stem cell lines and develop clinical guidelines.

We would hope to have something to say to ethicists, policy makers, lab scientists and clinicians. The aim is to take a very broad view of what constitutes stem cell research.

We are very conscious of the fact that stem cell researchers are organized in different ways in different countries, so we don't want to duplicate the efforts of other organizations. But, for example, it seemed to us that a registry documenting the provenance of human ES cell lines, would be of widespread utility to people.

Clinical guidelines are clearly an important thing to do. For example, what are the right questions you should ask if someone says they have a fantastic new therapy? How will you know that's it's validated — that the appropriate controls have been conducted. That's not saying that the legislation governing research should be the same in all countries. Of course it can't be. It's saying what we feel are reasonable principles.

Note: ISSCR's notes on its 2008 meeting and its request for feedback on clinical guidelines are available on its website.

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