NIH Announces Advanced Cell Technology's 'Single Cell Embryo Biopsy Technique' as a Means to Derive Embryonic Stem Cells to be Considered for Feder...( ACT Applauds NIH Plan to Implement ...)

ACT Applauds NIH Plan to Implement President Bush's Stem Cell Executive

Order

LOS ANGELES, Sept. 20 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- (OTC Bulletin Board: ACTC) On Tuesday, September 18, 2007, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced that it would begin implementing President George W. Bush's Executive Order to explore methods to expand the number of approved pluripotent stem cell lines "without creating a human embryo for research purposes or destroying, discarding, or subjecting to harm a human embryo or fetus."

This announcement follows an Executive Order issued by President Bush on June 20, 2007, requiring that "The Secretary of Health and Human Services ... conduct and support research on the isolation, derivation, production, and testing of stem cells that are capable of producing all or almost all of the cell types of the developing body and may result in improved understanding of or treatments for diseases and other adverse health conditions, but are derived without creating a human embryo for research purposes or destroying, discarding, or subjecting to harm a human embryo or fetus."

ACT's groundbreaking Single Cell Biopsy technique was cited by the NIH as an alternative method in its implementation plan -- a technique successfully demonstrated by Robert Lanza, M.D., Vice President of Research and Scientific Development at Advanced Cell Technology, and his team. The NIH plan calls for "aggressively pursuing an assessment of the potential of alternative sources of pluripotent stem cell lines, including altered nuclear transfer; single cell embryo biopsy, and reprogramming, or dedifferentiation of somatic cells, such as skin cells."

In August 2006, ACT published a paper in Nature documenting the technique for removing a single cell (known as a blastomere) from an eight-cell human embryo, and using that cell to generate multiple human embryonic stem cells without destroying the embryo. The NIH
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