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| (Photo and caption from the stem cell agency blog item this morning.) |
The $3 billion California stem cell
agency today weighed in on the Henrietta Lacks-NIH arrangement
restricting the use of her cell lines in research.
Writing on the agency's blog, Geoff
Lomax, the agency's senior officer for its standards group, noted
that the DNA sequence of her cell line was published without the
knowledge of her descendants. Lomax said,
“The family was understandably upset by the lack of consultation and in response the research team removed the genome data from public access.”
Lomax continued,
“CIRM has benefited from these efforts. We are currently supporting an initiative to collect tissue samples from thousands of people with a range of incurable diseases and create reprogrammed iPS cells from those tissues (here's more about that initiative). These cells will be a resource for scientists worldwide working to understand and treat diseases. Part of this initiative includes a consent process to make sure people who donate fully understand how their cells will be used. (This process is formally called informed consent.)
“The informed consent process includes a form that identifies the purposes of the research and describes the way cells will be used. We are also developing education materials that will help potential donors quickly and easily understand the basic aspects of research that will be conducted with those cells. The end result of this collaboration with our grantees will be a process that is truly informative to donors.
“The informed consent process can’t entirely eliminate all future questions on the part of the donor, but it does ensure that donors have a chance to understand how their cells will be used and what information will be made public—something Henrietta Lacks and her family never had.”
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