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Biotech / Medical : Geron Corp. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Savant who wrote (2234)	1/21/2000 12:06:00 PM
From: PHILLIP FLOTOW	Respond to of 3576

Dolly the Sheep Scientists Win Cloning Patent LONDON (Reuters) - U.S. biotechnology company Geron Corp (NasdaqNM:GERN - news), which bought the research company formed by the Scottish institute that cloned Dolly the sheep, has won the first UK patents for cloning. Geron Bio-Med, the company set up to exploit the cloning technology, is a British subsidiary of Geron based inside the Roslin Institute in Scotland where Dolly was created. The UK patents cover the nuclear transfer technology used to create Dolly. It gives California-based Geron sole rights to the technology which could help doctors grow living tissue, such as cartilage, bone and muscle, for transplants. ``The company (Geron) that bought this technology from Roslin has...paid $45 million to acquire it,' Simon Best, a spokesman for Geron Bio-Med, told BBC radio on Thursday. ``If we can save health services in the UK, the U.S. and around the world enormous amounts of money, and leave them with more money to spend on other medical applications that don't have solutions, it's win win for society,' Best added. Dolly the sheep, created in 1996, was the first mammal to be cloned using an embryo cell and a cell from another sheep's mammary gland. News that the patents had been granted sparked fears about the effects of a commercial company's monopoly on cloning technology. ``We are very concerned that controlling these very controversial technologies is falling into private hands, governed by their interests largely,' a spokeswoman for the campaign group Genewatch, told the BBC. ``Rather than stimulating research, we think it (patenting) will have exactly the opposite effect -- it'll stifle it.' When Geron announced the deal with the Roslin Institute last May, it said it planned to focus on growing human tissues that would not have the same immune problems as donor transplants. It aims to develop genetically identical cells from a patient that could be used to grow new tissue which could ultimately be used to treat a range of degenerative diseases such as cancer, Alzheimer's and osteoporosis. PHIL