Fetal tissue research carries on at UW after Biden team reverses Trump limits
District of Columbia, Wisconsin | April 26, 2021
The Biden administration’s loosening of restrictions on the use of fetal tissue in research will allow UW-Madison scientists to continue such studies, which opponents have tried several times to ban in Wisconsin.
After the Trump administration suspended federal funding for most fetal tissue research in 2019, it set up a new advisory board that rejected all but one of 14 proposals in August, which included one from UW-Madison. The Biden administration has lifted the funding ban, with the National Institutes of Health saying last week it will not use the advisory board and instead oversee the studies within the agency as it had before.
“It allows us to move forward with the research in a timely way,” said Anita Bhattacharyya, an assistant professor of biology at UW-Madison’s Waisman Center who uses fetal tissue to study Down syndrome. “That additional level of review was not necessary because we were already following all the guidance, all the laws, all the compliance requirements.”
Bhattacharyya’s research involving fetal tissue has continued because she received a grant before new funding stopped nearly two years ago. She applied for another grant in November and expects to learn by June if she will get it, a process that may have taken longer if the previous advisory board was involved, she said.
Wisconsin Right to Life, which last year praised the advisory board’s scrutiny of proposals involving fetal tissue, is “troubled that the (Biden) administration would decide to revert back to an Obama era way of doing things at NIH,” said Heather Weininger, executive director. “As the research world continues to look for better results in caring for the sick, we should not be relying on unethical resources for testing and production of vaccines or treatments.”…
(Excerpts from The Journal Times)