UW gets $10M stem-cell grant

The federal government has given $10 million to the University of Washington for comprehensive studies of embryonic stem cells, including research on how the powerful cells renew themselves and turn into heart and retinal-nerve cells.

The funding will go to the UW Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine, which encompasses four ongoing research projects and a laboratory to help bring other researchers up to speed on the intricacies of working with the complex cells.

Dr. C. Anthony Blau, a professor of medicine and hematology and co-director of the institute, said the UW is one of only two universities in the nation to land the coveted grant. The other is Baylor University in Texas.

"These are obviously tough to get," Blau said. "It's a big endeavor."

Because the money comes from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, one of the National Institutes of Health, the research will be restricted to the 21 stem-cell lines that came from embryos that had been destroyed before President Bush stopped federal funding of research on any new cell lines.

Even so, Blau said the grant will continue and dramatically expand work begun with an earlier federal grant to the UW and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center Exploratory Center for Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research.

"We really remain largely handcuffed" by dependence on federal money and the restrictions to older cell lines, Blau said. But the UW has also received private grants that will allow researchers to soon begin work with newer cell lines, which he said are even more powerful.

Cells from the older lines, he said, "peter out after a while and lose their ability to develop into key cell types."

Research with newer lines likely will be done in a UW building that is due to open next summer, said Dr. Chuck Murry, a UW professor of pathology and one of the grant recipients.

That building will be what Murry called a "federal funds-free zone," a step necessary to avoid jeopardizing any federal funding for other research.

Last week, Murry's achievements in coaxing embryonic stem cells to regrow into heart muscle in rats were published in the journal Nature Biotechnology.

Also funded by the federal grant will be a project by Tom Reh, a UW professor of biological structure who has used embryonic stem cells to repair retinas of mice. Also funded will be Randall Moon, who is looking at how stem cells get their power and instructions to become one type of cell or another.

The Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine's laboratory on stem-cell research already has helped 18 other labs at the UW and at Fred Hutchinson with stem-cell research, Blau said.

Carol M. Ostrom: 206-464-2249 or costrom@seattletimes.com