By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Writer
In what may be the first “fruits” of President Obama’s decision to allow taxpayer funding of experimentation on embryos, General Electric (GE) has announced a new liaison with Geron Corporation to begin using embryonic stem cells for the purpose of testing toxic effects of drug treatments.
According to report by Reuters, GE has entered into an agreement with the California based biotech firm, Geron Corporation, to use an existing batch of stem cells to develop sample human cells that drug companies can use to test the toxicity of new drugs earlier in the development process, before they are ready for animal testing or human clinical trials.
Konstantin Fiedler, general manager of cell technologies at GE Healthcare said the venture would not sell actual stem cells, but rather heart or liver cells derived from stem cells.
“This could replace, to a large extent, animal trials,” Fiedler said in a telephone interview. “Once you have human cells and you can get them in a standardized way, like you get right now your lab rats in a standardized way, you can actually do those experiments on those cells.”
However, GE is anticipating criticism over the ethics of the policy, which will involve the destruction of human embryos, and issued a statement saying, “We acknowledge the considerable debate and take very seriously the ethical and societal issues associated with research using stem cells derived from embryonic or fetal tissue. We conduct our research in an ethically and scientifically responsible manner.”
Geron Corporation issued a press release which essentially said that they believe the ends justify the means.
“Up to three quarters of toxicity problems are not detected until preclinical or later stages of drug development and this significantly increases the cost of developing new drugs. Earlier detection of toxicity problems could reduce both overall drug development costs and potentially harmful patient exposure in clinical trials.”
Both GE and Geron claim the stem cells they will use are listed on a National Institutes of Health registry, making them eligible for use in the United States.
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