Brain drain fears as Barack Obama lifts ban on stem-cell funding

British doctors are predicting a damaging brain drain of scientists to the US after President Obama's move today to lift the Bush Administration's restrictions on federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research.

Mr Obama's decision to overturn the funding ban is aimed at increasing the chance of finding cures for Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's and other afflictions. Yet it also promises to provide a new stream of financial support that could prove tempting for British researchers who are struggling to raise the money they need for their experiments, scientists said.

Mr Obama will sign an executive order lifting Mr Bush's funding ban. It is controversial with anti-abortion groups because stem cells are harvested from embryos that are destroyed in the process, an act that President Bush said crossed a “moral line”.

Stephen Minger, of King's College London, a stem-cell scientist who left the US for Britain because of the Government's more enthusiastic attitude to his research, said that the new American position posed significant challenges for British science.

“The UK remains an extremely competitive place to do stem-cell research, but if that is to be maintained the Government needs to make a sustained commitment to funding the field properly,” he said. “Competition for grants is extremely fierce, and many good funding applications are being turned down. We want to keep British scientists in Britain, but if the NIH [US National Institutes of Health] does make a lot of money available, that will obviously be tempting to many people.”

One of Professor Minger's own projects, for stem-cell research with human-animal hybrid embryos, recently failed to attract funding from the Medical Research Council.

Even though President Bush banned the NIH from financing most embryonic stem-cell research, US funding has long outstripped that available in Britain. Scientists based in America have always been free to experiment with embryonic stem cells using private funds and many states have also provided large sums.

The Medical Research Council spent £25.5million on all stem-cell research last year, 39 per cent of which went on embryonic projects. The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine spends $300million (£210million) a year. “Not all of this goes on embryonic research, but the money is already there in the US,” Professor Minger said. “Whether President Obama's move leads to more NIH funding remains to be seen: there will be legal challenges ahead. The significance is chiefly symbolic, in that it shows there is no longer a political bias against embryonic stem cells.”

Britain's advantage over the US in stem-cell research has always been political rather than financial: while the US Government has been opposed to embryonic stem-cell research and has blocked much of it, Britain has been enthusiastic. That no longer applies, making the US more attractive for stem-cell scientists.

The US also has a single body, the Food and Drug Administration, that is responsible for all regulation of stem-cell trials. British researchers, by contrast, must deal with three agencies: the Human Tissue Authority, the Gene Therapy Advisory Committee and the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency.

Robin Lovell-Badge, of the UK National Institute for Medical Research, said: “We absolutely have to streamline the regulation, or we will get nowhere. The end of the US funding ban is undoubtedly good news – this is an international field, and we have been deprived of the leadership the NIH can bring. But it does pose challenges for the UK. We need to make sure our funding and regulation are competitive.”

Yet it may be several months before the NIH starts to spend more on this field. Mr Obama's move will almost certainly face legal challenges, based on the “Dickey-Wicker amendment”. That is a 1995 rider passed by Congress along with an appropriations Bill that bans federal grants that go toward research involving the destruction of human embryos.