California Stem Cell Firm Battles Congress in Fallout From Planned Parenthood Flap

"Terrorized" is how the largest circulation newspaper in California, the Los Angeles Times, put it last year. That's the description of the plight of StemExpress, a small stem cell company in the Sierra Nevada foothills in California.

Now comes the Washington Post with a lengthy piece this weekend about the Placerville firm, which was caught up in the Planned Parenthood abortion/stem cell videos that are still rattling around the Internet. The headline on the story by Danielle Paquette said,

"‘We lose money doing this’: Tiny company caught in abortion debate takes on Congress"

The Post story picks up where the Times and also a piece on the California Stem Cell Report left off last year.

 

Paquette reports that the company has had to supply Republican congressional investigators with more than 2,000 pages of documents including five years of banking records. Employees have received death threats, and now the House committee wants the names of workers, a demand StemExpress is resisting. 

One particular target is Cate Dyer, president and founder of the firm. In December, a Washington

Cate Dyer, CEO of StemExpress
Photo by Max Whittaker for Washington Post

state man was arrested, according to the FBI, after he wrote on the Internet, 

“She will have to face the souls of the babies she’s bought and sold when she arrives on the other side. I’m sending her there early.”

Dyer was interviewed at some length for the article, describing the impact on her company. But it goes beyond what is happening to StemExpress. Paquette wrote, 

"The consequences of this supercharged debate transcend one firm. Scientists and doctors across the country say the political turmoil on Capitol Hill has stalled lifesaving work and imperiled progress toward, among other treatments, a Zika virus vaccine."

Paquette said,

"Those kinds of threats and the growing political pressure have chilled stem cell research at laboratories across the country."

The Post cited a case at Stanford, as well as one in New York state, involving a slow down in research.  Researcher Steven Sloan of Stanford said he was discouraged,

“The backlash makes you think twice about proceeding with this kind of work.”

Paquette concluded her article with this from Melanie Rose, a lab technician at StemExpress,

“This tissue would be thrown away if we didn’t send it to researchers who are truly trying to save lives. I want them to see what I’m doing. That something good can come of it.”

Three California Human Tissue Firms Targeted by House Committee

A Republican-dominated Congressional committee today zeroed in on three California human tissue firms entangled in the national flap over abortion and the Planned Parenthood Association.

All three were sent letters today seeking to determine whether the companies were in compliance with laws dealing with the distribution of fetal material.  They were given a deadline of Aug. 21 to provide a briefing to the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Questions include procedures involving informed consent from donors, fees for fetal tissue, the amount of revenue from fetal tissues in 2014 along with policies and practices for handling fetal tissue.

StemExpress of Placerville, east of Sacramento, and its president Cate Dyer, received one of the letters. The stem cell and tissue firm has been much in the news about the controversy. The flap was triggered by Internet videos with Planned Parenthood officials that were taped surreptitiously by anti-abortion activists using false identities and false company credentials.

Both the federal and California departments of justice are investigating whether the anti-abortion activists violated the law when they made the undercover videos. 

The other two letters went to Linda Tracy, president of Advanced Bioscience Resources, Inc., of Alameda, and Ben Van Handel, executive director of Novogenix Laboratories, LLC, of Los Angeles. (See the letter to Advanced here, the letter to Novogenix here.)

The letters to StemExpress and the Advanced Bioscience referred to a July 27, New York Times article that included them. The House committee letter quoted from the piece.

The article by Denise Grady and Nicolaus St. Fleur said, 

"(F)etal tissue is a uniquely rich source of the stem cells that give rise to tissues and organs, and that studying how they develop can provide clues about how to grow replacements for parts of the body that have failed.

“'Think of fetal tissue as a kind of instruction booklet,' said Sheldon Miller, the scientific director of the intramural research program at the National Eye Institute.

"Stem cells derived from adult tissue may eventually replace fetal ones, researchers say, but the science is not there yet."

All three companies were told by the House committee,

“Under the NIH Revitalization Act of 1993, it is "unlawful for any person to knowingly acquire, receive, or otherwise transfer any human fetal tissue for valuable consideration if the
transfer affects interstate commerce." While this provision prohibits the sale or purchase of fetal
tissue itself, the term "valuable consideration" does not include reasonable payments associated
with the transportation, implantation, processing, preservation, quality control, or storage of
human fetal tissue. As the committee with legislative jurisdiction over the NIH Revitalization
Act of 1993, we have an oversight responsibility and interest in determining whether there is
adequate compliance with the law, and/or whether the law is adequately meeting ethical and
moral concerns." 

A Reuters story said that none of the companies has responded to a request for comment.