BioWorld International Correspondent

BRUSSELS, Belgium - The European Parliament's temporary committee on human genetics will resume its work on April 26 with an expert hearing on genetics and medicine featuring leading international scientists looking at the scientific, ethical, social, medical, legal and psychological aspects of research involving embryos and cloning. The committee aims to complete its review by the end of this year, so as to present an overview of how genetic research should be oriented and controlled in Europe.

In a background paper submitted for the meeting, senior researchers from GlaxoSmithKline plc, of London, argue that genetic research and the establishment, maintenance and use of genetic databases will be important catalysts for major advances in the discovery, development and use of novel medicines, and argue for a pragmatic approach by the Parliament.

The public must be confident that genetic research is conducted with sufficient safeguards to protect individual interests while allowing legitimate and beneficial medical research to proceed, the paper acknowledges. It urges clear informed consent processes, which include consistent terminology regarding the degree to which genetic research information can be linked to participants.

Provided the small number of large-scale publicly or partly publicly funded genetic epidemiological databases planned or ongoing in the European Union (EU) are established maintained and used to high ethical standards, they are potentially important research tools that will ensure European citizens can avail themselves of the significant benefits of genetic research, and attract further investment into the European biomedical science sector, says the paper. The EU should therefore begin to think broadly about the opportunities presented by genetics and value of health informatics databases as a research resource, it says.

In the clinic, the heterogeneity of genetic testing complicates the task of recommending appropriate policies, it goes on. So, it is important to guard against a "one size fits all" approach. For example, a legal and regulatory environment which prescribes public policy based solely on the ethical, legal and social issues associated with genetic tests for single gene disorders may inadvertently delay the development and application of other genetic technologies that have a different magnitude of ethical, legal and social issues but will provide significant health care benefits.

Anne McLaren, an eminent British scientist now working with the Wellcome Institute of Cancer and Developmental Biology in Cambridge, argues in a paper she will present that recent advances in stem cell biology have led to new hopes for therapies of degenerative diseases, and also urges a research-friendly regime. Promising though adult and fetal stem cell approaches appear to be, evidence suggests that embryonic stem cells have greater proliferative potential and greater plasticity, she will say.

Research on human embryos, provided it is strictly regulated and for a clinically important objective, is recognized by many as ethically acceptable, her argument runs. However, if stem cell therapy is found to be effective, the problem of graft rejection remains, and one solution would be to derive the stem cells from a blastocyst-stage embryo with the genetic complement of one of the patient's own somatic cells, using somatic cell nuclear replacement.

McLaren will warn, however, that the chief objection to this procedure is that "it might prove a slippery slope to reproductive cloning" - although, as she will point out, in most European countries reproductive cloning is strictly prohibited.