Year: 2007
Type: article
Abstract: The expansion of public funding for stem cell research at both the U.S. federal and state levels promises real opportunities for advancing public health and human welfare.However, the technical, proprietary, and regulatory conditions currently giving shape to stem cell R&D are far from ideal: closed information, congested entitlements, and regulatory uncertainty present formidable challenges for the conduct of research and its translation into practical applications.Such an environment is likely to slow the pace of innovation, skew the distribution of health benefits towards the wealthy, and force ethical decision-making that lacks public accountability.Here we propose an institutional mechanism to coordinate the conduct and governance of human stem cell R&D: a collaboration among academic institutions to collect and make available information detailing the technical, proprietary, and ethical characteristics of cell lines and research tools developed at participating institutions.Centralization would help promote more efficient transfer and use of available and ethically preferential technologies.The coalition could also leverage the collected information to assemble and disseminate complex enabling research tools under common material transfer agreements or patent pools in those cases where multiple patents are necessary but are fractionated across multiple owners.The goal of such collective action would be to support more efficient exchange of technologies within the stem cell research community and for product development in industry, to orient stem cell research to the more pressing public health needs, and to promote the least ethically-controversial forms of stem cell research.
Authors: Krishanu Saha, G. D. Graff, David E. Winickoff
Institution: University of California, Berkeley
Language: English
Subfield: Physiology (medical)
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: National Institutes of Health
OpenAlex ID: W38230983