Washington

Industry and private foundations are taking the lead in stem-cell research, while Congress wrestles with legislation and researchers wait for revised guidelines from the US National Institutes of Health. But even though they don't face the tighter regulation and heightened scrutiny of federally funded research, private stem-cell backers are still finding that their efforts attract controversy.

The University of Wisconsin's technology transfer office, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), has set up a non-profit company to distribute embryonic stem cells isolated and grown by one of the university's researchers, James Thomson. His work was funded by a biotech company called Geron, based in Menlo Park, California.

According to WARF's managing director, Carl Gulbrandsen, the non-profit company, WiCell Research Institution, will begin distributing the cells in June, whether or not the NIH guidelines have been completed. If they have not been completed, he says, privately funded investigators will still have access to Thomson's embryonic stem cells, whereas publicly funded scientists will have to wait.

But the terms under which WiCell is making the cells available are likely to stir controversy — the company's material transfer agreement gives it the right to require that any cells not used for the purposes expressed in researchers' applications are destroyed.

The Wisconsin state legislature may also have an impact on the company. A bill to ban the sale or transfer of human tissue narrowly missed being put up for a vote during the most recent legislative term. The bill may re-emerge in the autumn.

Meanwhile, Project ALS, a New York-based non-profit institution, is also funding stem-cell research. So far, the research it pays for has involved only cells derived from aborted fetuses rather than from discarded embryos. Federal sources can now fund fetal tissue research, but not embryonic cell research.

The cells distributed by Project ALS have until now come from Layton BioScience of Sunnyvale, California. The company has exclusive licence on any commercial application that may result from research using its cell lines.

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) has formally begun considering funding stem-cell research. In a meeting last month, the institute's leadership began to weigh the pros and cons of moving ahead, but has not yet come to a decision. “HHMI will consider in a deliberate manner how it ought to proceed in this potentially vital scientific research area, recognizing both the promise of the research and the ethical challenges it presents,” says spokesman Robert Potter.