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A researcher checks the temperature at a Tianjin-based umbilical cord blood stem cell bank.
Photo by Wei Chijian. |
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But more shocking to Sun was that she hadn’t heard a word about the bank during a visit to China, just two months earlier. She first knew of its existence through a journalist.
“I was startled,” Sun said.
But she soon realized that the bank, part of a planned 20 square-kilometer research complex in eastern China, did not deal with the sort of cells she works with-- embryonic, or induced pluripotent (iPS), stem cells. Instead, the bank’s focus is on adult stem cells, the basic ingredient for much of the clinical research taking place in China today.
“Stem cell-based therapeutic interventions could potentially be the new wave of modern medicine,” said Sun. “Every [country] is pretty much at the same starting point, [so] it makes a lot of sense for China to put efforts and resources in this area.”
China’s government officials may be thinking the same thing: Since 2000, they have increased the federal budget for stem cell research to as much as U.S. $146 million annually from 2007 to 2011. And just this May, Premier Wen Jiabao declared biotechnology, “a pillar technology industry.” As part of China’s new stimulus package, biotech companies will enjoy preferential tax policies and greater opportunities to participate in government-sponsored funding initiatives.
Most of that funding is not bound for basic research, as in the United States, but for clinical research with immediate medical and therapeutic application.
“It is more than a pride issue, but a practical one,” said Xu Jun, a neuroscientist who just returned from the United States to join a brand new stem cell research center at Tongji University in Shanghai.
“Stem cell research is all about treating people,” he said. “So when you’ve got 1.3 billion people, it is about creating new treatments and cures for various illnesses while saving billions of dollars on health care.”
Stem cell research of virtually any sort has the support of the public, as well. Since most Chinese do not attach a special moral value to embryos, even embryonic stem cell research has not faced the same legal or ethical hurdles that it has in the United States.
And even with recent advances shifting the focus of the field to adult stem cell research, Chinese institutions are adapting, said Gao Shaorong, a researcher with China’s National Institute for Biological Sciences (NIBS) in Beijing.
“Advances have allowed scientists to move away from using embryonic stem cells for research,” said Gao. “But that’s not something we have to worry much about, [as] we are picking up in the new areas.”
Before he took his current position, Gao spent seven years in Scotland and the United States. In 2005, he returned from an assistant professorship at the University of Connecticut to lead a lab at NIBS staffed with eager young researchers and a promised annual funding of U.S. $300,000.
Chinese research institutions are welcoming returnees like Gao and Xu with open arms.
"China is in the stage [the United States was when it] was developing the fastest," Xu said, adding that his excitement toward coming back last year was comparable with what he felt when he headed to the United States in 2000.
According to Xu Guotong, executive dean of the school of medicine at Tongji University, China now has about 200 researchers at the professor or associate professor level dedicated to stem cell research.
And while their numbers are still small, their work has merited increased publication and international recognition, Xu Guotong said.
One of the best examples is researcher Deng Hongkui, who trained in the United States and is now a professor at Peking University. He is best known for his development of stem cells that can produce natural insulin-- a critical innovation given the rising incidence of diabetes throughout the Asian region.
Just last December, Deng and his team reported in Cell Stem Cell that they had not only discovered a stable and efficient method of inducing human iPS cells, but that they had also increased the efficiency of that inducement nearly 100 times-- a “remarkable achievement,” according to Gao.
Deng’s paper was one of 744 stem cell articles coming out of China between 1998 and 2008, putting China in the “top ten” list of countries publishing on the topic during that same period.
However, plenty of hurdles stand in the way of making China a world leader in stem cell research. To begin with, the quality of research is still relatively low.
While the average citation number for a stem cell article is 15.30 for a U.K.-based research group, 11.37 for a U.S.-based group, 9.53 for a Japan-based group and 8.36 for a group from Germany, it is only 3.45 for a group from China, according to data calculated from the ISI Web of Knowledge.
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Professor Gao Shaorong speaks at the International Forum on Stem Cell 2008, in Tianjin, China.
Photo courtesy of chinablood.com.cn. |
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A lack of China-based stem cell specialists is one of the main reasons for such a low number, said Xu Guotong. He said that China has more than 30 stem cell research teams, with 300 to 400 researchers in possession or pursuit of a doctorate degree.
“That’s about twice the number of researchers conducting stem cell-related study at one of the top universities in the US,” he said.
And competition for even these researchers is heating up, especially with the United States.
With the lifting of U.S. federal funding restrictions on embryonic stem cell research in March, more U.S.-based researchers will be able to tap into the National Institutes of Health budget for stem cell research, which was $938 million in 2008. And with U.S. $10 billion appropriated to the NIH as part of the economic stimulus bill, that amount will probably be even higher.
But money and bodies aside, a lack of collaboration among Chinese scientists may be one of the biggest barriers to advances in stem cell research in China.
"If scientific progress tends to progress through the interconnected findings of a broad group of investigators, then China does not seem to be building the domestic networks that one might expect to lead to breakthrough discoveries," wrote Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard business professors Fiona Murray and Debora Spar in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2005.
Xu Guotong acknowledged the problem, but he said China is taking action to improve the situation. That includes the establishment of a national stem cell bank network, sponsored by the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology, and headed by Xu himself.
To be completed in two years, the network will serve as a collaboration platform, a database center and a public resource for embryonic stem cells.
The network will seek to bring younger scientists into the fold, as well as older scientists with experience training in the West, according to Xu Guotong. He said these younger scientists offer untapped potential.
“We hope SCB will bring them aboard,” he said.
One researcher whom they have already brought on board is Sun Yi. Although Sun will continue her primary work at the University of California, she will be joining a new stem cell research center established by the College of Basic Medicine at Tongji University this summer, where she will serve as center director.
Researcher Xu Jun compared China’s pursuit of stem cell technology to the country’s pursuit of excellence in sports.
“It is like in a race; We are lagging behind, but the game has just started,” he said. “It is a cause not to be achieved overnight. But with enough guts, it will be done.”
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