Companies and Labs With Stem Cell Lines

Companies, universities and research laboratories with stem cell lines:

Goteborg University, Goteborg, Sweden, 19 stem cell lines. Goteborg is Sweden's largest institution of higher learning. The university's medical students and faculty engage in basic and applied research in such areas as cell and tissue surfaces, cardiovascular diseases, and endocrinology and metabolism.

Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, Madison, Wis., five lines. The foundation holds patents on the first embryonic human stem cells and the process that the University of Wisconsin's James Thomson used to derive them in 1998. The foundation has licensed a private company, Geron Corp. of Menlo Park, Calif., to use its stem cell lines, but also has said it wants to make the cells widely available to researchers. Earlier this month, the foundation sued Geron in an effort to limit its use of the commercial stem cell license.

BresaGen Inc., Athens, Ga., four lines. Founded in Adelaide, Australia, BresaGen announced in July that it had derived embryonic stem cell lines with a process different from that used by Thompson at Wisconsin. The company's work grew from Australian scientist Peter Rathjen's experiments on mice at Adelaide University.

CyThera Inc., San Diego, nine lines. CyThera is a privately held biotechnology company that was founded in early 2000 to develop cell replacement therapies for the treatment of human degenerative disease. The company's initial focus is on treatments for diabetes, though it is hoping to develop treatments for liver disease, Parkinson's disease, macular degeneration and stroke.

Karolinska Institute, Sweden, five lines. The Karolinska Institute, Sweden's only university for medicine, awards the Nobel Prize each year in physiology or medicine.

University of California, San Francisco, two lines. In July, the university suspended all embryonic stem cell research until it could move the work off campus. Roger A. Pedersen, who had been researching stem cells at the university with financing from Geron, then left to go to the University of Cambridge in Britain.

Reliance Life Sciences, Mumbai, India, seven lines. Reliance Life Sciences is a division of the Reliance Group, India's largest business conglomerate.

Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel, four lines. One team of researchers at Technion announced earlier this month that they had succeeded in growing the precursors of heart cells from embryonic stem cells. Another team claimed to have demonstrated that human embryonic stem cells can be used to produce insulin.

Monash University, Australia, six lines. Researchers at Monash have concentrated on cloning technology for the treatment of neurological diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. They were among the first to grow human nerve cells in the laboratory and to successfully clone mouse stem cell lines.

National Center for Biological Sciences, Bangalore, India, three lines. The NCBS, a branch of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, specializes in research on the frontiers of biology, including genetics and cellular organization.