The National Institutes of Health will be providing grants that encourage the use of new types of tissue that would replace fetal tissue in medical research.
“The program aims to develop and/or further refine human tissue models that closely mimic and can be used to reliably model human embryonic development or other aspects of human biology, for example, the human immune system,” the NIH said in a statement. “Research proposals may include using these models to understand human tissue development, function, and disease.”
The announcement from the government’s medical research branch comes amid a debate over whether to end all funding for fetal tissue research. Much of the tissue is obtained from abortions, and anti-abortion groups have been pressuring the administration to drop all funding on the matter.
Researchers who use the tissue have argued that it is vital for developing treatments or cures to conditions such as HIV and Parkinson’s disease.
Trump administration officials have been meeting with medical groups, ethicists, and anti-abortion advocates in recent weeks to determine what to do about the research, and the administration announced in September that it was conducting an audit across all of its health agencies to make sure that all regulatory, ethical, and moral guidelines were being met.
The announcement followed a decision by the Department of Health and Human Services, the NIH’s parent agency, to end a contract with Advanced Bioscience Resources, Inc., saying the contract didn’t have appropriate protections in place.
Last week the Washington Post published a story saying that the Trump administration planned to end another contract at the University of California at San Francisco, where fetal tissue was implanted into mice to conduct research on HIV.
The Trump administration called the story “completely false,” saying a decision on the contract hasn’t been made yet.
Science Magazine also reported that the NIH had ordered its scientists to stop acquiring new human fetal tissue for experiments. These scientists are directly employed by the agency, rather than outside universities or organizations receiving grants from NIH.
The NIH estimates that roughly $98 million was spent in 2017 on research involving fetal tissue. Grants have gone toward studies on yellow fever, dry eye disease, Down syndrome, and cervical cancer.
The topic of fetal tissue donation drew widespread media attention a few years ago because of a series of videos released by the Center for Medical Progress, an anti-abortion group that accused Planned Parenthood of selling fetal tissue for profit and of altering the way it performs abortions in order to gather more intact specimens. Planned Parenthood denied wrongdoing.
