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American Morning

Limited Access To Stem Cells For Research

Aired August 17, 2001 - 10:27   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: The University of Wisconsin's patent agency is negotiating a settlement with the California company it sued earlier this week over access to stem cells produced by school researchers. The two sides say they expect to resolve their differences.

At issue are the type and number of cells that can be developed from five stem cell lines, the corporation funded by the university's original research on the stem cells.

LEON HARRIS, CNN ANCHOR: Well our question this morning is: are patents on stem cell techniques becoming a roadblock to research?

Our guest, here to talk about that, is Arthur Caplan, he is director of bioethics for the University of Pennsylvania. He joins us from Philadelphia this morning.

Nice to have you back with us, again.

ARTHUR CAPLAN, BIOETHICIST: Good morning.

HARRIS: Now, I know that the reports that we're hearing now about this corporation may not register as news to you, but it's just now beginning to sink into many of us who are just now trying to grasp this whole stem cell issue, and what's possible and what's not, and where the road lies.

Now is it obviously and very, very clear now that this idea of being able to -- a company being able to patent the stem cell research -- this is actually going to block the path for any real research being done?

CAPLAN: I don't know if it's going to block it, but it's going to put a very big obstacle in the way. Most of these stem cells that we're talking about - well, let's say half of them - they're are overseas, other companies own them, and they're not going to want to allow release into this country because they're going to be fighting an American patent owned by this University of Wisconsin and private company called Geron.

So half of them, roughly, are, I'm going to say, off the table. Of the remaining ones, if you have a patent as the University of Wisconsin and Geron do, and they're fighting with each other about this right now. You're going to have to agree to deal with them as a university or a publicly-funded institution, and give them all kinds of rights to products or inventions that you make from the stem cells. A lot of schools, by their trustees direction or by the state government's direction, can't do that.

I think we're going to really have a problem here in fulfilling what Tommy Thompson promised, what George Bush promised. That is, what's out there is enough, what's out there can be used. Just on problems of patenting alone, very tough to get at these things.

HARRIS: The other question that comes up is that if there are such patents in other countries, or that if -- whether just if other stem cell lines are actually privately owned someplace else outside of this country. The government, our government can't even ensure that researchers will get the access that they asked for to these stem cell line.

CAPLAN: I think we can say safely they have no ability to get at those stem cells. A lot of though companies in Singapore, Australia, they're not going to want to deal with us, they have their own commercial plans.

So at the end of the day we have two problems: hard to get at because a lot are held overseas by companies that won't deal with us; and at home a few companies have already taken patents on stem cells, they may or may not want to deal with different universities depending.

So what that means at the end of the day is this publicly-funded research is going to be dealing immediately with companies who are going to be calling the shots.

HARRIS: So suddenly this number of 60 lines goes down the buttress pretty quickly.

CAPLAN: Pretty quickly.

HARRIS: Boy, this is -- that can be rather troubling. We want to talk about this some more, but we're out of time this morning. Arthur Caplan, thank you.

CAPLAN: My pleasure.

HARRIS: Thank you very much. We'll talk with you about this, no doubt, later on.

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