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Sharing culture: BresaGen's stem cells could soon be available free of charge to researchers. Credit: BRESAGEN

Academic researchers in the United States should soon be able to access certain human embryonic stem-cell lines for free.

BresaGen, a company based in Adelaide, Australia, and ES Cell International (ESI) in Singapore say they plan to give their cells away to publicly funded scientists.

In return, the companies will ask for first rights to license any therapeutics and medical procedures that emerge from the research. The companies have developed ten human embryonic stem-cell lines between them.

The offer contrasts with the $5,000 flat fee charged by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), which holds the US patent to human embryonic stem cells. WARF's private, non-profit laboratory says its fee is less than the cost of producing the cells.

Representatives from BresaGen will this week meet with officials in Washington to discuss how the company will distribute its cells to researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Meetings between the NIH and the holders of other stem-cell lines are also being planned.

Cell for nothing: BresaGen's chief scientist Allan Robins.

Allan Robins, BresaGen's chief scientist, says that one option being considered is a single, independent distribution centre that would handle all the cell lines for which federal funding will be permitted under rules announced by President George W. Bush on 9 August.

Such a centre could include all 60 of the stem-cell lines that the NIH says exist — 45 or so of which are not accounted for by WARF, ESI or BresaGen. The sources of these cells have not yet been identified, and many scientists are sceptical about their existence.

On 17 August, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), one of the largest US scientific societies, issued a strongly worded statement calling on the Bush administration to publish the source of these stem-cell lines immediately.

Noting that Bush's policy depends heavily on the existence of the cell lines, the statement said that "it is essential that confusion over the actual number available be resolved as soon as possible". It also raised questions about whether cell lines derived abroad would meet US ethical standards. As of 20 August, the White House had made no response to the statement.

BresaGen has four of the known human embryonic stem-cell lines, which it derived at its US laboratory in Athens, Georgia. Robins says the company hopes to provide the cells to researchers free of charge. "We would like to be giving the cell lines away so they can be used as much as possible," he says.

ESI says it has already agreed to provide two of its six embryonic stem-cell lines to 15 laboratories worldwide, including several in the United States, for the cost of shipping.

ESI's lines were developed a year ago by a team of researchers headed by Alan Trounson at Monash University in Victoria, Australia (see Nature Biotech. 18, 399–404; 2000).

"We are getting two or three requests a day since the Bush announcement," says ESI operations manager Catriona King.

Despite researchers' fears about the terms of access to stem-cell lines, the companies that have derived them appear keen to get them into laboratories as quickly as possible. BresaGen and ESI also say researchers will be free to patent any invention they develop using the cells. The companies' profits will come from commercializing therapies that emerge from the research.

"First options have become the standard," says Mary Ellen Sheridan, associate vice-president for research at the University of Chicago. Researchers and their institutions rarely object because private companies are better able to handle the cost of clinical trials and marketing. And most options expire within a year, after which the researcher can take the invention elsewhere, Sheridan says.

WARF, by contrast, will try to recover its investment by exercising its broad patent rights to human embryonic stem cells. The foundation does not ask for the option to license researchers' inventions, because any company that markets such an invention in the United States will have to pay WARF for a commercial licence to the underlying technology.

But some intellectual-property experts say WARF's patent is so broad it may be challenged in court. "When you have a broad patent there is the possibility that broad claims will be held invalid and you will be left with a narrower patent," says Rebecca Eisenberg, a specialist in biotechnology patent law at the University of Michigan.