The decision to ban patented inventions using human embryonic stem cells has anticipated and condemned by leading stem-cell scientists argue that it would end investment in this new area of medical research and put Europe into the dark ages in contrast to Asia Pacific and the Americas.

The ban also threatens to undermine the Scottish research project to produce industrial-scale quantities of synthetic blood for hospital transfusions. Scientist at Glasgow, Heriot-Watt, Edinburgh and Dundee with the Scottish Blood Transfusion Service funded by the Wellcome Trust medical research charity, are working to attempt to mass-produce human red blood cells from stem cells derived from spare IVF embryos, and could now fbe forced to switch to non-embryonic stem cells.

Professor Marc Turner, director of the Scottish Blood Transfusion Service in Edinburgh, told TheIndependent  that the ban on patents using human embryonic stem cells could also jeopardise his project on synthetic blood because it is likely to affect future investment by private organisations.

More than 100 spare IVF embryos from fertility clinics have been used to establish several embryonic stem cell lines that replicate continuously in the laboratory. One cell line, known as RC-7, has been successfully converted into mature red blood cells, however tests have shown that the line of cells is not the O-negative universal donor.

Professor Turner said there are still technical problems with the technique, such as the ability of the red cells to eject their nucleii correctly, but he hopes to begin clinical trials in two or three years.

PROGRAMMING WETWARE APPROACH

The success of the SynBioNT project to create a ‘re-programmable cell’ could revolutionise synthetic biology and pave the way for scientists to create completely new, useful forms of life using a relatively hassle-free approach.

Professor Natalio Krasnogor (left) of the University’s School of Computer Science, who leads the Interdisciplinary Computing and Complex Systems Research Group, said: “We are looking at creating a cell’s equivalent to a computer operating system, in such a way that a given group of cells could be seamlessly re-programmed to perform any function without needing to modifying its hardware.” 

“We are talking about a highly ambitious goal leading to a fundamental breakthrough that will, —ultimately, allow us to rapidly prototype, implement and deploy living entities that are completely new and do not appear in nature, adapting them so they perform new useful functions.”



The game-changing technology could substantially accelerate Synthetic Biology R&D which has been linked to myriad applications — from the creation of new sources of food and environmental solutions to a host of new medical breakthroughs such as drugs tailored to individual patients and the growth of new organs for transplant patients and possibly blood.



Nottiingham University leads the multi-disciplinary project, funded with a leadership fellowship for Professor Krasnogor worth more than £1m from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), and involving computer scientists, biologists and chemists from Nottingham as well as academics at the Universities of Edinburgh, Arizona, Michigan, MIT, New York, California San Francisco and Santa Barbara, Spain's Centro Nacional de Biotecnologia and the Weizmann Institute, Israel.



Towards a Biological Cell Operating System (AUdACiOuS) — is attempting to go beyond systems biology  the science behind understanding how living organisms work — to give scientists the power to create biological systems. The scientists will start the work by attempting to make e.coli bacteria much more easy to program.



Professor Krasnogor added: “This EPSRC Leadership Fellowship will allow me to transfer my expertise in Computer Science and informatics into the wet lab.



“Currently, each time we need a cell that will perform a certain new function we have to recreate it from scratch which is a long and laborious process. Most people think all we have to do to modify behaviour is to modify a cell’s DNA but it’s not as simple as that — we usually find we get the wrong behaviour and then we are back to square one.

"If we succeed with this AUdACiOuS project, in five years time, we will be programming bacterial cells in the computer and compiling and storing its program into these new cells so they can readily execute them."