WARF and Thomson Go for Patents with New Stem Cell Developments

The Internet is humming with details and interpretations of today's big news in stem cell research: Two teams have successfully reprogrammed human somatic cells to "dedifferentiate" into a pluripotent state. If this pans out, the new method will produce not only pluripotent stem cells without the destruction of embryos, but also disease-specific stem cells without eggs or cloning. Clearly, this will dramatically alter the political and scientific landscape.

The key points have been made in our press statement, other ­blogs, and the numerous media accounts. One small item, though, caught my eye. Among the daily print media, only Malcolm Ritter at the Associated Press noted that the technology transfer organization of the University of Wisconsin, where one of the two teams is based, is requesting patents for the new method. You may recall that this researcher, James Thomson, and the tech transfer office, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, filed broadly-worded patents when he was the first to isolate human embryonic stem cells almost ten years ago. Now, those patents are widely criticized by other scientists as stifling research and are the subjected of a Patent and Trade Office review, which had been requested by public-interest critics.

It would be unfortunate if the implementation of the new discoveries, which have the potential to beak the political and ethical logjams of both embryonic and cloning-based stem cell research, were to be hindered by such a patent.Given the amount of critical attention that the Thomson/WARF patents have received, it will be interesting to see how observers, particularly other stem cell scientists, react to the new filing. A key question that remains unclear is whether Yamanaka, who appears to be the pioneer in the field, will join on the patent application.