June 30, 2008

reaction to the news that the HFEA has granted the third licence to create human-animal hybrid embryos for research

The one-year licence was granted to a team at the University of Warwick led by Prof Justin St. John. They are attempting to create cloned embryos by combining human skin cells with pig eggs, which will be used in research into possible treatments for heart disease. This follows the granting of licenses to teams at Newcastle University and King’s College London.

Prof Justin St. John, Professor of Reproductive Biology at Warwick Medical School, University of Warwick, said:

“This new license allows us to attempt to make human pig clones to produce embryonic stem cells. We will take skin cells from patients who have a mutation for certain kinds of heart disease (cardiomyopathy) and put them into pig eggs after their chromosomes have been removed. We will then make embryos so that we can attempt to derive embryonic stem cells which will allow us to study some of the molecular mechanisms associated with these heart diseases.

“Ultimately they will help us to understand where some of the problems associated with these diseases arise and they could also provide models for the pharmaceutical industry to test new drugs. We will effectively be creating and studying these diseases in a dish. But it’s important to say that we’re at the very early stages of this research and it will take a considerable amount of time. There is still a great deal to learn about these techniques and much of our early work will involve understanding how we can make the hybrid cloning process as efficient as possible.

“The key thing we are doing is trying to create stem cells without any animal DNA in them. So even though these hybrid embryos normally have a small percentage of animal DNA , we are hoping to create cells that would have human chromosomes and human mitochondrial DNA.”

Prof. Robin Lovell-Badge, MRC National Institute For Medical Research, said:

“Justin St John is doing experiments using pig eggs and mouse cells to see how the mitochondria from the donor cell behaves in competition with those from host eggs. It will be hugely useful to do this research to establish how human mitochondria behave in competition with animal egg derived mitochondria.

“It is good news that this license has been issued at a time when parliament has expressed overwhelming support for this research after an excellent public debate. I suspect other similar applications will follow and hopefully this research can now progress without the hype.”