Stem cell bid wins $46.5m Centre of Excellence funding

A proposal to create a Centre for Stem Cells and Tissue Repair has won a $46.5 million Federal grant to create a national Biotechnology Centre of Excellence.

The centre, to be headed by Prof Alan Trounson of the Monash Institute of Reproduction and Development, is set to become what it says will be the world's first research facility dedicated to study and commercialise stem cell therapies, using both embryonic and adult cells.

Prime Minister John Howard announced the winner, which won out over four other finalists, including one for neuroscience and another for infectious disease. The stem cell centre will be headquartered in a building under construction at Monash University.

In a statement, Trounson said the centre would put Australia at the forefront of stem cell research.

"We have some of the world's best stem cell researchers, we have access to human stem cell lines for research and the possibility of developing new and advanced high value stem cell lines," he said. "Now we have a dedicated research centre to push this work forward, from the laboratory to the bedside."

Key players in the bid included the recently-formed National Centre for Advanced Cell Engineering and the National Neuroscience Facility, both headquartered in Melbourne.

Other stakeholders behind the winning bid included Monash and Swinburne Universities, the Universities of Melbourne, NSW, Adelaide and Queensland, the ANU, the Victor Chang Cardiovascular Research Institute, the Peter MacCallum Cancer Institute, the Murdoch Institute and companies ES Cell International and BresaGen.

Assoc Prof Melissa Little, a key team member in the winning bid and a Sylvia and Charles Viertel research fellow at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience, at the University of Queensland, said she thought the government was brave to choose the stem cell centre in the face of recent controversy about embryonic stem cell research.

"I would like to think that the government [chose the winner] on the basis of its biotechnology skills and prospects, not because of the controversy," she said.

Little, whose research team will be part of a renal regeneration program at the centre, said that the decision was a good omen for the fate of legislation about to go before Parliament that will govern stem cell research.

She said that she and other researchers were keen to see proper accounting procedures set in place for stem cell research.

In its proposal, the centre said it would generate new embryonic and adult stem cell lines with novel and enhanced characteristics for detection, differentiation and clinical uses, and characterise them through their gene and protein expression patterns.

It will define the conditions needed for the differentiation of the cell lines into different types of cells, such as pancreatic islet cells for diabetes treatment or nerve cells for diseases like Parkinson's, multiple sclerosis, stroke and paraplegia.

When state government funding and commercial revenues are added to the Commonwealth funding, the centre will leverage more than $82 million.

Dr Merilyn Sleigh, vice-chairperson of the panel of experts behind the winning bid, said that all the finalists were excellent. "I wish we had had four times the money," she said.