Headlines: March 17, 2010
by Meg Larkin
As a controversial vote on Health Reform in the House approaches, undecided Democrats are being aggressively courted by the White House. In an effort to get 216 votes in favor of Reform, President Obama is making phone calls, holding individual meetings and visiting the districts of many undecided Democrats. A key vote is that of Dennis Kucinich who is seen as a leader by the more liberal wing of the Democratic Party. Kucinich flew on Airforce One with President Obama to a rally Obama was holding in his Cleveland, Ohio District, and is expected to announce how he will be voting later today.
As Congressional leaders try to corrall votes in favor of reform, they also face a series of procedural hurdles. House Democrats, who are wary of their Senate counterparts, are looking for a way to pass the reconciliation package before the Senate bill is signed in to law. Many lawmakers in the house have a deep dislike of many of the Senate bill’s provisions, including special aid packages for Florida and Nebraska. House Democrats want the changes from the reconciliation process to be attached to the Senate bill before it is presented to President Obama. A vote on the changes to the bill may come as early as this weekend.
In national research news, President Obama’s revised stem cell research guidelines may be hampering research more than they are helping it. During the Bush Administration, governmental stem cell research funding was restricted to only 21 lines that had been derived before the start of the administration, in order to avoid the destruction of new embryos. The Obama Administration has issued new guidelines that focus on informed consent of the embryo donor, which allow access to more stem cell lines. However, the Obama administration did not allow the original 21 stem cell lines to be grandfathered in, halting research while the 21 lines are examined for compliance with the new guidelines. Because of the age of the original stem cell lines, it is difficult to find some of the original donors and some of the researchers who derived the lines are no longer around. So far only one of the original lines has been found to meet the new guidelines. Researchers are calling on the Obama Administration to add a grandfather provision that would allow research to continue on the original 21 lines, but the Administration is proceeding with its current policy for the foreseeable future.
In pharmaceutical news, many pharmaceutical companies are having trouble competing in emerging markets. While drug sales growth is declining in much of the developed world, it continues to grow at a much faster pace in emerging markets. However, the volatile conditions of some of those markets can make it difficult for western drug makers to compete effectively. According to the New York Times, “The top 15 pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer, Merck and Eli Lilly, together derive less than 10 percent of their sales from emerging markets.”
Finally, researchers may have identified the reason that thalidomide causes phocomelia, the failure of embryos to develop limbs. Thalidomide, which was taken by many women for morning sickness in the 1950s was linked to phocomelia and is no longer prescribed for that use. However, thalidomide is still useful for the treatment of leprosy and some kinds of cancer, and so researchers searched for a way to remove the negative effects that it can have on developing fetuses. Researchers found that thalidomide links to a particular protein that is crucial to the development of blood vessels in limbs. If researchers find a way to keep thalidomide from binding to the protein they may be able to severely curb the potential for embryos to develop with phocomelia.
