Seattle researchers applaud lifting of stem-cell restrictions

Researchers in Seattle who work with embryonic stem cells reacted with scientific relief and personal jubilation to President Obama's decision Monday to reverse Bush-era restrictions that have hobbled their field for much of this decade.

At the University of Washington, which has one of the nation's largest concentration of researchers studying cells from human embryos, the news that federal funding now can be used to tap into hundreds of newer stem-cell lines stirred hopes for faster progress against heart disease, blindness and other medical conditions.

"There has been a huge, dark cloud for years" on scientific progress, said Randy Moon, director, Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine at the University of Washington. "This lifts the pall."

Dr. Tony Blau, a hematologist and a co-director of the UW institute, reveled at the scientific reversal of fortune.

"We just had a president who didn't believe in evolution," Blau said. "We now have a president who is guided by rational thought process. It just restores a tremendous amount of confidence."

Along with many institutions around the country, the UW until now had been limited largely to working with 14 of the 21 stem-cell lines created before 2001. But nearly a third of the 14 federally approved lines grew cells so slowly as to be not worthwhile, Blau said.

What's more, they were so contaminated by repeated exposure to serums and viruses that they likely never could have been injected into patients as therapy, Moon said.

The UW could have developed its own stem-cell lines by using only private money — an expensive proposition that it only recently began pursuing. The UW obtains leftover embryos from a Seattle fertility clinic with the consent of couples.

Embryonic stem cells can be grown in labs into more specialized cells. They can be propagated, for instance, into heart-muscle cells that beat in a Petri dish. Dr. Charles Murry, a co-director of the UW stem-cell institute, is hoping to develop therapies to treat heart failure.

Blau said the restrictions on stem-cell lines were akin to "trying to use today's software with a computer that was made in 2001."

Access to the new stem-cell lines, Blau said, will enable researchers to much more fully understand the variations in DNA sequences and the different ways that genes are "turned on" in individuals, and "open an incredible new window."

Kyung Song: 206-464-2423 or ksong@seattletimes.com