China: A New Force in Stem Cell Field

Ari Daniel Shapiro reports that China is quickly becoming a major player in the field of cloning and stem cell research.

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DAVID BARON: Europe, and the United States, are where most advances in cloning and stem cells have taken place. But another country is quickly becoming a major player in the field. That’s China. As reporter Ari Daniel Shapiro explains, China’s efforts are starting to get some attention.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO:  If you want evidence of China’s rising status in stem cell research, look no farther than the State Key Laboratory of Reproductive Biology in Beijing.

ZHOU QI:  This is the main place for my laboratory.

SHAPIRO: That’s Professor Zhou Qi. His lab’s on the second floor of a new building just down the street from Beijing’s Bird’s Nest Olympic stadium. The facility’s teeming with Chinese biologists who’ve spent time abroad. Zhou used to do stem cell research in France, but he came back to China seven years ago.

QI: Now many, many people go back to China to work because the funding, the collaboration really become better than before.

SHAPIRO: And the return of Chinese scientists has begun to pay off in discoveries, including for Zhou. Now around the world, embryonic stem cells have sparked a lot of excitement. Scientists may someday use them to make replacement body parts and tissues to cure diseases and treat injuries. But the field’s also generated controversy because these cells have to be harvested from embryos. Zhou Qi wanted to sidestep the ethical concerns. Instead of taking stem cells from embryos, he wanted to make stem cells from bits of skin. Zhou did the experiment in mice, and it worked. His team took a skin cell from an adult mouse and converted it into a stem cell. They proved it could function just like an embryonic stem cell because they used it to grow an entire new mouse. Zhou’s graduate student Tong Man says when this mouse was born, it was a big day for the lab, and the field.

TONG MAN: We just, “Wow, wow,” you know? That’s the first one all around the world. During that time we know that there is no one, there is nobody could make this mouse.

SHAPIRO: Well, actually, there was someone who did essentially the same experiment and created a mouse from a skin cell. His name is Gao Shaorong.

GAO SHAORONG: When the first mouse was born, we know we made history, actually, in this field.

SHAPIRO: Gao also works in Beijing. He’s at the National Institute of Biological Sciences, just across town from Zhou Qi.

SHAORONG:  Our paper and his paper were published online the same day. Actually, I remember the exact date. July 23rd, 2009.

SHAPIRO: The fact that these two Chinese labs produced the same important finding and published on the same day in two high-impact science journals says a lot about the state of stem cell science in China today and the global competitiveness of the researchers.

DOMINIQUE MCMAHON: Chinese researchers are gaining traction in this field. Their publication numbers have gone way up, and they certainly have made some important discoveries in the field.

SHAPIRO: Dominique McMahon is a global health researcher at the University of Toronto who’s written about stem cell research in China. She says China now ranks fifth in the world in the number of stem cell studies published in peer-reviewed journals. But McMahon says the country still has a poor reputation among some Western scientists. That’s because in the past, much of China’s work with stem cells occurred in poorly regulated clinics that tested questionable therapies directly on patients.

MCMAHON: And so a lot of the researchers that I’ve spoken to in the West think these Chinese researchers are just injecting patients with stem cells, and not going through traditional scientific rigorous techniques. But that’s just not true.

SHAPIRO: China’s growing competitiveness in stem cell science is certainly evident to the Chinese. Tao Cheng works half the year at the University of Pittsburgh and the rest of the time as Science Director at China’s Institute of Hematology outside Beijing. He says it’s no surprise why China’s become such a major player.

TAO CHENG: The government has invested so much money for stem cell research, I think even more dramatically than other field.

SHAPIRO: That money from the Chinese government is funding research projects, scientist salaries, and new labs and clinics. As for the two Beijing labs that reported the same finding on the same day last year, they’re still working hard, this time to turn their basic research in mice into therapies for humans. Gao Shaorong is working on a blood disorder called beta thalassemia.  Zhou Qi hopes to develop a therapy for Parkinson’s disease. For The World, I’m Ari Daniel Shapiro, Beijing.

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