How Fetal Tissue Ban Affects Research on Alzheimer’s, Other Diseases - Healthline

Barbara Binzak Blumenfeld, shareholder in the firm's Life Sciences industry, comments on the Trump administration's decision to end all research conducted at the National Institutes of Health that use human fetal tissue, which has previously led to the development of vaccines against various diseases, including hepatitis A and chickenpox, and investigations into a cure for HIV.

"There is a lot of angst in the research community right now about the impact of this new policy on publicly funded research," Barbara Binzak Blumenfeld, PhD, a shareholder at the law firm of Buchanan Ingersoll and Rooney, told Healthline. "At a minimum, the policy creates a hurdle for those people engaged in research using this type of tissue."

One of the biggest questions, she said, is what the HHS’s newly announced ethics advisory board will look like and how it will function.

"It is possible that the new ethics advisory board process will be used to further narrow the availability of federal funding to human fetal tissue extramural research," she said. "[But] we simply do not yet know all of the parameters about how this policy will be implemented."

Read more in Healthline's article "How Fetal Tissue Ban Affects Research on Alzheimer's, Other Diseases."