The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : “India needs regulations for stem cell research”

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Feb 21, 2008
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Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

“India needs regulations for stem cell research”

Special Correspondent

CHENNAI: New stem cell technologies to predict whether medicines under development will be dangerous can cut the cost of clinical trials by 25 per cent while reducing risk to patients, according to a team of award-winning British scientists.

But, India needs to develop a regulatory framework for stem cell research and better monitored clinical trials to facilitate the development of this technology into therapy its population can use, said the scientists who were here seeking partners for research and development.

“We are interested in increasing the speed with which stem cell research going on academically can help people,” said Colin McGuckin of the Newcastle Centre for Cord Blood International Centre for Life. Testing a drug on stem tissue would help to reduce animal testing and to gain a better understanding of how the drug affected humans.

“In an ideal situation, we could have multi-centred clinical trials going on all over the world that all adhered to global standards so that we can review the results according to the same criteria,” his colleague Nico Forraz explained.

But, he later told The Hindu, “In India, the regulations are just not there yet.” And while some private hospitals might have the capacity to monitor patients correctly, public hospitals were more of a problem in India, they said.

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