Gulf widens between UK and US over use of foetal cells in research
There is a growing divide between the United States and the United Kingdom over the use of foetal tissues in biomedical research.
The US has imposed tight restrictions on studies using foetal tissue from elective terminations and banned it outright within the National Institutes of Health laboratories. But in the UK, millions of pounds have been channelled into research using these materials.
On 25 September, the US government’s regulations kicked into gear, requiring stringent application and ethics approval processes for any research projects receiving NIH funding that aim to use foetal tissue from elective terminations.
Back in the UK, Andrew Copp, one of the two principal investigators with the human embryonic and foetal tissue bank, the Human Developmental Biology Resource, told Research Professional News that there is no hint of similar suppression in the UK. In fact, in the past five years there has been a surge of interest in the HDBR’s services.
“The number of requests for material is increasing—that’s been a gradual upward trend,” said Copp, who is also a professor of developmental biology at University College London’s Institute of Child Health.
The resource, which has been running for 20 years, is funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Medical Research Council and collects foetal tissue from a handful of clinics in the UK. The material is donated following terminations of what are mostly unwanted pregnancies. The HDBR only collects material from foetuses four to 22 weeks post fertilisation.
Copp believes that the UK is unusual, as one of a few countries in the world that has robust regulations and standards in place surrounding the use of foetal material. “I think people can feel confident that it is properly policed,” he said.
These regulations have been accompanied by a rise in funding for research on human development requiring foetal tissue. In July, the Wellcome Trust announced the launch of the £10 million Human Developmental Biology Initiative that will last five years and will use material from the HDBR. Andrew Chisholm, Wellcome’s head of cellular and developmental sciences said that the project was “the first building block of international efforts looking directly at human development”.
In December 2018, the MRC also announced an injection of £6.7m into the international Human Cell Atlas, with many of the projects supported by this funding using foetal tissue.
“The funding of human development is becoming more organised and better from the point of view of the science system. So the demand on us is greater,” explained Copp.
However, the rise in research funding and increased demand for foetal tissue material in the UK has coincided with a national push for women to terminate pregnancies in the comfort of their own homes, provided their pregnancy is still in the early stages.
This change in policy has been widely welcomed, but has led to a drop in the source of material that could have been donated to research.
While Copp welcomes the change in policy, he admits that it has been “challenging” for the HDBR. He said that if his team were to expand their work, it would need to collect material from more clinics. However, this is not as simple as it may seem.
Increasing the number of clinics where material is collected is not just about securing extra funding. “The funding doesn’t really limit us,” said Copp. Instead, it is the time-consuming and complex process of working with a clinic. The clinics are very busy, and their primary aim is to do the termination. We are supernumerary,” he said.
“We’ve had clinics where we’ve tried to collect in the past and that didn’t work out for logistical reasons, so we gave up. We are always on the lookout for more clinics that we can form a collaboration with, because that makes us more secure in that we can buffer any changes in supply that may happen,” he said.
Using foetal tissue in research is still controversial as the clampdown in the US illustrates. But scientists say there is no denying how vital it is in understanding how birth defects and diseases affect young children. It is also used in research on HIV, Parkinson’s and regenerative medicine.
“It’s like taking the next step from an animal model, whether it’s a mice or fish, to really confirm or otherwise, that the rules you’re discovering are true for humans, because we’re different,” said Copp.
“I think it’s essential that we do this work in humans where we can. Obviously it raises ethical issues [and] it’s not what everyone would approve of ethically, but on the other hand, we take all the ethical steps that we can to ensure we do this correctly, and it has proven to be very valuable in terms of the research that’s coming out of it.”