Biotech Company in Bid to Buy Aborted Baby Parts
By Patrick Goodenough
CNSNews.com Pacific Rim Bureau Chief
June 12, 2003

Pacific Rim Bureau (CNSNews.com) - Health officials in Australia and New Zealand have been approached by agents for a Dutch biotech company wanting to buy tissue from aborted babies to use in medical research.

Applications were made to ethics committees in the two countries, but were recently withdrawn after concerns were raised about the controversial proposals.

The Dutch firm has been using the services of a Sydney-based contract outsourcing company, Parexel, whose parent company, Parexel International Corp., is headquartered in Massachusetts. Both Parexel and Crucell are listed on the Nasdaq.

According to Crucell's website, the company carries out research into vaccines for such diseases as HIV-AIDS. On Wednesday it announced it was working on a vaccine for the West Nile virus, news that sent its share price up more than 27 percent.

A specialist familiar with the application to an Australian hospital ethics committee told CNSNews.com Wednesday Crucell evidently wanted to use retinal cells - the building blocks of the eye - from aborted babies in the development of its vaccines.

The European-based company was looking for sources in Australia and New Zealand, he explained, because the Food and Drug Administration in the U.S. had identified the two countries as those where the risk of BSE ("mad cow disease") contamination was "next to zero."

The doctor said this was an issue because it was theoretically possible - although not considered very likely - that a woman with the human form of BSE (known as Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease), could transfer it to her baby.

If that child was subsequently aborted, and cells from the body used in research, contamination could possibly occur.

Crucell presumably would not want the U.S. market closed to any product it developed in the future, and so was looking for tissue from "safe" sources.

'Serious reservations'

In New Zealand, Crucell's proposal was put before an ethics committee in the capital, Wellington, but was withdrawn suddenly last month after concerns were raised.

A regional health board said "preliminary discussions over the possibility of the tissue being made available by Wellington Hospital" had raised concerns.

"This type of research is new to New Zealand and, as with any research proposal, needed ethical committee scrutiny," said the general manager of a regional health board, Dr.\b John Coughlan, in a statement issued earlier but made available by his office Wednesday.

"During this process it was soon realized by everyone involved that there are no guidelines in this country governing the provision and use of fetal tissue for research," he said.

The New Zealand health ministry is currently carrying out a review on how human tissue may be used for research.

In Australia, the application was made to an ethics committee at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Adelaide, capital of South Australia state.

A representative of the hospital, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Wednesday Parexel had withdrawn the application after the committee made it clear it had "serious reservations."

He said the committee would usually go through a process of examining a research proposal in detail, to see whether it would offer any benefit, and whether there were any ethical problems about the envisaged work.

After prolonged discussion in this case, it was evident that the committee was "not of a mind to approve this application," and the company was told this.

Even with major revisions to the proposal, it appeared unlikely that a plan involving "purchasing parts of fetuses" would be approved, he said.

Some of the ethical issues raised related to obtaining the "informed consent" of the woman who was carrying the baby prior to the abortion, and the question of payment - "how much, and what the money would be used for."

The hospital representative said the committee members had been "very pleased" when the application was withdrawn.

Even if the committee had approved the proposal, he added, there may well also have been legal problems.

A decade ago, Australia's National Health and Medical Research Council published guidelines about the use of tissue from aborted babies in research.

They say that the mother, and where possible the father, of the unborn child must give consent to any research to be carried out the child she had been carrying.

Also, the guidelines say, "there should be no element of commerce involved in the transfer of human fetal tissue."

It's not known whether Crucell or Parexel have made applications elsewhere in Australia and New Zealand.

Parexel's Australian office declined to answer questions, referring all inquiries to Crucell in the Netherlands. Queries were emailed both to Crucell and to Parexel in the U.S. but had drawn no response more than 24 hours after being sent.

'Trafficking in human flesh'

Some 90,000 abortions are carried out in Australia (pop. 19 million) each year and another 16,000 in New Zealand (pop. 4 million).

Australian pro-lifers said they were horrified by the news that money could be made from trading in the bodies of aborted babies.

"To seek out and exploit the remains of unborn children for research purposes is a frightening violation of human dignity and creates a new kind of trafficking in human flesh," the spokeswoman for the Australian Federation of Right to Life Associations, Mary Joseph, said Thursday.

She said the proposed research would debase the humanity not only of the dead unborn child, but also of "those in the laboratory who have to handle and violate the tiny body or body parts in order to perform the research."

"If an unborn child has, tragically, not received this love and care in life, her abortion cannot be a license for others to exploit and abuse her in death," Joseph added.

The Dutch research proposal may be the first time it has been suggested that money exchange hands for tissue from aborted babies, but it wouldn't be the first time the bodies of aborted Australian children were used in research.

An article in the Medical Journal of Australia back in 1993 recorded that some research staff, when first handling tissue from babies aborted at between 12 and 20 weeks gestation, experienced emotional reactions, "becoming tearful or having nightmares."

Last year, when Australian lawmakers were grappling with legislation that would allow stem cell research on human embryos, some of the country's top bio-tech researchers argued that they may need to use aborted human "fetal tissue" in their work.

The tissue, they explained, would be used as a base layer on which to grow embryos for stem cell research.

Embryos are usually grown on a "feeder layer" or "growing culture" derived from mice, but there are concerns that using such embryos for stem cell research could raise the risk of mice-to-human infection.

Pro-lifers were stunned at the thought that human embryos would not only be created for destruction, but may also be grown on tissue from aborted babies.

One pro-life lawmaker wondered whether the proposal was aimed at giving "some bizarre moral foundation to abortions."