BioWorld International Correspondent

LONDON - Scientists in Newcastle, UK, have breached an ethical barrier in embryonic stem cell research, receiving permission to pay women for egg donations used in therapeutic human cloning.

The team from the North East England Stem Cell Institute received permission to extend an existing egg-sharing scheme, under which women undergoing in vitro fertilization will pay only half the usual cost of treatment if they agree to donate half the eggs produced to cloning research. Currently, the egg donations are reserved for women who cannot produce their own eggs.

Permission to extend the scheme was granted by the regulatory agency the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), which announced simultaneously that it would launch a widespread public consultation in September to develop new rules on the donation of eggs for research.

Allowing egg sharing for research purposes is an extension to an existing license granted to Alison Murdoch, professor of reproductive medicine and director of the Newcastle National Health Service Fertility Centre in 2004. That license permitted researchers to seek patient consent to use eggs that failed to fertilize and those from women undergoing follicle reduction, in research.

One of those eggs produced the only human embryo to date that is proved to have been cloned. The publication of that advance in May 2005 was overshadowed by the more sensational progress made by Hwang Woo-suk in South Korea, but with the discrediting of his work, the Newcastle clone is acknowledged as a world first.

Following on from that, in 2005 Murdoch received approval to ask IVF patients to donate two fresh eggs to research if more than 12 had been collected. But the researchers say the number donated is too slow to allow work to progress rapidly, with the existing practice providing only 66 eggs in seven months.

Murdoch said the HFEA's decision was a step forward for stem cell research. "Volunteers have been essential to medical research for many years, and this is just another way of engaging volunteers in a research project. Our experience is that these patients understand the benefits of our research, and the majority are very keen to participate."

Last week another of the UK's leading stem cell researchers, Stephen Minger, said he was preparing to apply to the HFEA for permission to use enucleated rabbit, pig and cow oocytes as the recipients of adult human nuclei.

Minger, who is head of the Stem Cell Laboratory at King's College London, hopes to use the greater supply of oocytes to perfect the technique of cloning and argues that as there are risks involved in extracting human eggs, and they are in such short supply, it is unethical to use them for cloning research until methods of cloning and then generating embryonic stem cell lines have been perfected.

No embryonic stem cell lines resulted from the human clone generated in Newcastle, and Murdoch has argued consistently that nuclear transfer is likely to be successful only if the eggs are fresh and used immediately after they have been removed.

"Of course, it is of paramount importance to ensure that all donors are not recruited to participate in this research against their best interest by coercion or excessive financial inducement," Murdoch said. "We are helping [patients] to have treatment they may not otherwise be able to afford. There is no additional physical risk to the woman as a result of egg sharing."