The Medical Research Council (MRC) is to fund a research proposal from a team at the North East England Stem Cell Institute (NESCI) for a project to find ways of improving the efficiency of therapeutic cloning - a technique which would allow scientists to create patient-specific stem cells and develop regenerative therapies for many debilitating conditions such as diabetes, heart disease and Parkinson’s disease.
This project will involve the MRC reimbursing part of the treatment costs of women undergoing IVF at the Newcastle Fertility Centre at Life and who choose to donate some of the surplus eggs produced to be used in the research.
The proposal, submitted by Professor Alison Murdoch and Dr Mary Herbert, was deemed ethically acceptable by the MRC Council following advice from the MRC’s Ethics Policy Advisory Committee. While there are ethical issues in providing payment for treatment of people who are participating in research, and this is not normally MRC policy, in this case the women would be taking no additional risks to their health by providing surplus eggs for research. In addition, it was accepted that this would be the only approach that could provide the number of human eggs necessary for this ground-breaking research. A number of conditions are tied to the research going ahead. As well as ensuring that all the right safeguards are in place to protect participants, the MRC decided that there should be an independent social science study undertaken alongside it in order to learn from women’s experiences and to inform future research involving egg donation and payment of IVF treatment costs.
The research plans had already been licensed by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), the UK body with the formal responsibility for licensing such work, and had received local ethics committee approval.