TIMES NEWS NETWORK

CHIDANAND RAJGHATTA

WASHINGTON: Two premier Indian research labs are among the 10 elite organisations worldwide that will supply embryonic stem cells for use by federally funded American researchers.

The Mumbai-based Reliance Life Sciences of the Reliance Group and the Bangalore-based National Center for Biological Sciences (NCBS) will be part of the privileged group that includes four organisations from the United States, two from Sweden, and one each from Australia and Israel.

Embryonic stem cells, usually retrieved from the core of 5 to 7 day old human embryos, can grow into virtually every kind of tissue in the human body when nurtured properly. They can be used as a regenerative source for tissues damaged in diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and other medical disorders.

Government funding for stem cell research is a political hot potato in the United States because of a large constituency that believes life begins with the first agglomeration of cells. But it is less of an issue in other countries, especially in India, where even fetuses, much less the more primordial stem cells, are not regarded with the same sensitivity.

The Bush administration's decision to go ahead with federal funding for stem cell research earlier this month was based on the worldwide availability of nearly 60 stem cell lines (far more than the ten or so initially thought to exist), including some from India as reported by this correspondent.

US officials had at that time acknowledged that Indian labs were part of the group identified as having potential stem cell lines, but declined to identify them citing proprietary concerns.

It now transpires that Reliance Life Sciences has been tapped for seven stem cell lines and the NCBS will provide three more lines. The Indian cell lines were identified after the US officials began a worldwide hunt for embryos and wrote to top researchers working in the area. One such researcher was Dr Mitradas Panicker of NCBS.

In a telephonic interview from Bangalore with this correspondent, NCBS Director Prof K. Vijayaraghavan acknowledged that US officials had identified the Center as having "potential stem cell lines."

"At this time, things are at a very preliminary stage not just here but worldwide," Prof Vijayaraghavan said, "Dr Panicker and his team have frozen the inner cell mass from embryos and are in the process of testing and analysing them. Any collaboration will depend on further progress in determining the characteristics of the lines."

Embryonic cells have a high attrition rate. The Indian lines were derived before the August 9 deadline set by the Bush administration (to thwart researchers from perforce extracting new lines).

"I think we may have three 'potential' human stem cell lines. These have been derived from frozen embryos with informed consent from the patients for the specific purpose and it was donated without payment.

Decision regarding registering these lines will only be taken once the National Institute of Health sends us the forms and conditions and we have studied them," Dr Panicker said in an e-mail message.

Prof Vijayaraghavan cautioned that Indian participation in stem cell research would be "subject to the guidelines of the Department of Biotechnology and the Government of India." The prudence though was mixed with obvious delight that Indian scientists were involved in cutting edge biological research with profound implications for medical science.

"Stem cell research holds many exciting possibilities in the long run. We are glad we are at the forefront of this adventure," he said.

Besides the two Indian organisations - Reliance Life Sciences could not be reached - others worldwide who are identified as potential stem cell line suppliers are CyThera of San Diego (9 lines);

Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, or WARF, of Madison (5); BresaGen, Athens, Georgia (4); University of California, San Francisco (2); Goteborg University of Sweden (19); Karolinska Institute, Stockholm (5); Monash Institute of Reproductive Biology, Melbourne, Australia (6); and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa (4).

What is remarkable about the stem cells research project is the alliance worldwide between government and academic organisations, and private enterprises such as CyThera, BresaGen, and Reliance. The National Institute of Health here, which is the nodal agency for the research, is expected to publicly disclose the names shortly.