The US Department of Justice will quickly appeal yesterday’s district court injunction temporarily freezing federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research, a department spokesman said today. The department aims to appeal this week to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, asking it to lift the injunction, the spokesman told reporters on Tuesday.
Also on Tuesday, the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) outlined in dramatic terms the impact of yesterday’s freeze on US funding for embryonic stem cell research, the result of an injunction issued on Monday by Royce Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Nature blogged about the injunction here.
In a hastily arranged conference call with reporters on Tuesday afternoon, NIH director Francis Collins said that the administration reads the ruling to apply not only to lines funded for the first time under President Barack Obama’s March 2009 executive order liberalizing US funding for stem cell research, but also to the score of lines that were eligible for federal funding under President George W. Bush. Several of those are in particularly widespread use among scientists.
NIH grantees who have already received funds this fiscal year for projects involving human embryonic stem cell research will be allowed to spend those monies on those projects, Collins said. But new grant applications, and annual renewals of existing awards will “stop in their tracks.”
“I was stunned as was virtually everyone here at NIH by the judicial decision yesterday,” Collins said. “This decision has the potential to do serious damage to one of the most promising areas of biomedical research—and just at the time when we were really gaining momentum.”
Collins added that the injunction“has just poured sand” into one of the most exciting engines of discovery funded by NIH. “If this decision stands, very promising research on human diseases…will not get done.”
The NIH director declined to discuss legal aspects of the case, deferring those to the Department of Justice. He did say that “this injunction, if it is interpreted the way the Department of Justice has now looked at it, would also say that the Bush lines approved in August, 2001 could also not be used for federal funding.”
He outlined in stark terms the immediate impact of the injunction on NIH-funded researchers:
• 50 new grant applications in line to begin the peer review process will be pulled.
• 12 grants cumulatively worth $15 to $20 million, which had already scored highly in the first stage of peer review and were to be reviewed by institute councils at the biomedical agency next month, will not be reviewed. “Council is not even allowed to discuss them on the basis of this decision,” Collins said.
• 22 grants totaling $54 million that are due for annual renewal during the month of September will not be renewed. This means that funding for these partly-completed grants, which are commonly executed over a period of three to five years, will suddenly run dry. The notion that private funding could replace the federal support for these grants needs to be met “with a great deal of skepticism,” Collins said. “There would be in fact considerable jeopardy” for such projects, he said.
Grantees who have already received their annual renewals or new awards earlier in the government’s 2010 fiscal year will be able to spend that money: $131 million spread across 199 grants.
Collins said that it is not clear how the ruling will effect grantees’ requests for “no-cost extensions” to their grants, a common practice in which NIH allows grantees to spend grant money not yet expended when the year during which it was intended to be spent is over.
Collins also noted that an expert committee meeting scheduled for Tuesday had been abruptly cancelled as a result of the injunction. The committee was to have reviewed the next batch of applications of stem cell lines for addition to the NIH registry of 75 lines that, until yesterday, were available for federal funding.
The NIH director was asked repeatedly about the premise that led the court to grant standing to the plaintiffs in the lawsuit that led to the injunction: that adult stem cell researchers were being harmed by NIH’s expanded funding of human embryonic stem cell research. After avoiding the question several times, Collins said: “It’s not as if we have a pot of money for stem cell research and that means that everything we are going to pay out comes out of a certain dollar figure, and if one goes up the other has to go down. That’s not how it works.”
Researchers, meanwhile, seem uniformly distressed. “This will do irreparable harm to the field because it would discontinue funding to scores of projects throughout the country,” said Sean Morrison, the director of the Center for Stem Cell Biology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The ruling, because it reverses even the more restrictive Bush-era policy “does greater harm to human embryonic stem cell researchers than any policy ever enacted,” Morrison argued.