Imagine you needed an organ transplant. You could wait months for a match to come through from an organ donor. Even when it did, you would face the prospect of your body rejecting it and perhaps needing a cocktail of drugs to suppress your immune system. However, all this might, one day, be unnecessary because the organ you will get will be a perfect match. Indeed, it will have been made from your own cells. No chance of rejection and no need for expensive drugs.
This is just one of the therapies that lie along the road that is stem cell research. Others include treatments for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases, diabetes, damaged spinal cord, heart disease and muscular dystrophy.
These dream therapies are brought a step closer today as the world's first stem cell bank opens for business. It will be a tremendous medical resource: it has the potential to accelerate massively the field of regenerative medicine and it sets the benchmark for stem cell research worldwide. Funded by the Medical Research Council and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, the new bank will be based in the National Institute for Biological Standards and Control in Hertfordshire. It is the only place in the world that will systematically maintain and distribute an ever-growing range of stem cells to scientists around the world. And the Centre for Neuroscience Research at King's College London yesterday donated one of the bank's first set of embryonic stem cells.
Most stem cell populations are found early in development, when tissues like the heart, pancreas and brain are being generated. In many of these tissues, the stem cells then disappear once development is over. However, there are some stem cells that are retained throughout life, especially those found in the bone marrow that give rise to blood cells. The most unusual stem cells are embryonic stem (ES) cells, which are isolated from very early six-day old human embryos. These cells have the amazing property of being able to generate every cell type in the body as they ultimately give rise to a complete organism.
There has been a fierce moral debate about the use of these cells for several years now. On the one hand, supporters have been pointing to the huge potential of the work to start treating the causes, rather than just the symptoms, of disease. Those against the work insist that taking stem cells from embryos for research purposes is wrong and that the cloning techniques used by researchers could be abused to reproduce humans. Meanwhile, the research is tightly regulated in Britain and the bank will form a key part of that regulation and monitoring.
The "ES cell lines" that will be stored at the new bank are simply sets of cells that have been isolated from the inner cell mass of a six-day old blastocyst and then cloned repeatedly to expand their numbers. We use a trick of cell culture to keep these locked into this undifferentiated state: they are isolated from the embryo before they get the chemical signals telling them what they should turn into and if they are grown properly, we can expand them to large numbers without allowing them to begin to turn into specific tissues until we want them to. They can sit there waiting for the signal indefinitely. As a tool for research, they are unparalleled.
Each stem cell line comes from a different embryo. In essence, they're all more or less similar but each line, like every human being, has slightly different characteristics - not least its genetic makeup.
Worldwide, there are about 60-70 lines now and how different each of them are from each other, we don't know. There's a big international consortium doing a systematic analysis of all these different cell populations and asking: are all human embryonic stem cell lines the same, or does each line have unique characteristics?
More importantly, can we compare research done with one line with that done with another, which may have been derived under very different conditions. The creation of the bank will make this problem redundant - different research groups can now access identical cell lines.
At King's we are very interested in generating human ES cell lines that encode important human genetic disorders, for instance Huntington's disease or cystic fibrosis. These cells will be important tools, not only for understanding the mechanism of these disorders, but also as cells that can be used to look for new drugs or other therapies.
Currently, this work is done by studying post-mortem tissue or setting up non-human models of the disease. But working with dead tissue is like trying to understand how a train locomotive works by reconstructing it from a train crash; and a mouse model may not faithfully replicate all facets of the disease. With stem cells, we will have human cells encoding human mutations in a normal human context.
Stem cells could also directly help people suffering from type one diabetes by turning them into pancreatic cells that can make insulin. Growing individual cells is all very well but the challenge of growing more complex three-dimensional tissues, whole organs for example, looms large. What chemical signals you give to stem cells that tell them to develop into cardiac cells and then assemble into a working heart is something that will keep tissue engineers busy for years.
But these therapies will only move forward very slowly while access to stem cells is restricted. The cell lines we are donating to the bank are the result of our own frustration. It dates back three years - before the laws governing the use of stem cells were passed in the UK. Back then, it was almost impossible to obtain access to any human ES cells anywhere in the world. There were just two places - in Wisconsin and Singapore - that had them and demand was high. Making stem cell lines is very, very difficult. First you need access to large numbers of high-quality embryos. If you manage to isolate the inner cell mass and establish a population of ES cells, creating a line then takes six months of hard work.
At the time we started, two years ago, we really had to teach ourselves how to do this work - there was no expertise we could draw on. However, we have been relatively successful and, to date, we have made three lines.
But if the lines just sit in our lab, their potential will never be realised fully. The best thing is to have as many people working on them as possible. Advances in medicine will come more quickly when people are approaching problems from completely different perspectives. The stem cell bank will be able to multiply indefinitely the cells in its care and send scientists - molecular biologists, biochemists or physiologists, for example - around the world a ready supply for their work.
Aside from the speeding up of vital medical research, the bank is also a testament to Britain's clear-cut policy in an area of research that raises ethical questions. Many people are hostile to using stem cells because they object to the harvesting of cells from embryos. They feel scientists should not be allowed to use embryos left over from fertility treatments for research.
But the majority of people polled in this country are in favour of stem cell research as long as embryos are not made solely for the purpose of extracting stem cells. By storing and cloning stem cells, the bank should go a long way to reducing the need for cells that come directly from new embryos.
By regulating access to stem cell lines and keeping a close watch on who has them and what people are doing with them, the Human Embryology and Fertilisation Authority will be able to regulate the work.
Compare Britain's policy with that of the US. There, George Bush has made his objections to the work clear by disallowing public funds from being used for the generation of stem cells, although some limited work on cell lines derived before 2001 is allowed. However, if you have private money in America, with the minimum of checks, you can do cloning, you can buy embryos, you can buy gametes, you can make embryos and you can make stem cells.
I look at the stem cell policy in the US and I don't understand it whatsoever. It is the most intellectually incoherent policy you could possibly have.
The climate for the stem cell research among scientists here is phenomenal. There have already been at least 15 labs that have contacted me in recent months asking when they can get access to our cell lines. There are currently eight institutions that have licences to generate human embryonic stem cells in this country but there must be four or five times as many labs that would like to gain access to cells, and that don't want to go through what it takes to get a licence and generate their own.
I'm proud of the work we've done. I'm proud to be one of the first labs to put a stem cell line into the bank. Britain is going to lead the world in stem cell research, I'm absolutely convinced of that. The UK Stem Cell Bank is fundamental for that to happen.
· Stephen Minger, director of the Stem Cell Biology Laboratory at the Centre for Neuroscience Research, King's College London, was talking to Alok Jha.
Stem cell links
· Medical Research Council background paper
· Stem cell information resource from the US National Institutes of Health
