UW-Madison will be home to the newly created National Stem Cell Bank, Gov. Jim Doyle’s office said Friday.
The nation’s first embryonic stem-cell bank, awarded in a competitive process by the National Institutes of Health, presumably will be at the WiCell Institute. WiCell is a subsidiary of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, which holds a patent on stem-cell work by UW-Madison researcher James Thomson.
WARF controls five of the 22 available stem-cell lines eligible for federal funding under President Bush’s 2001 policy. According to the NIH, the new bank will consolidate the other lines in one location, maintain them and distribute them to researchers at a cost less than what researchers now pay to study them.
The other lines are housed in Athens, Ga.; San Francisco and labs in Australia, Israel, Korea and Sweden.