has a historic link to stem cell legislation in the United States. In 1996, a Republican-controlled Congress, in a rider attached to the appropriations bill for the Department of Health and Human Services, banned the use of federal funds for any research in which a human embryo is either created or destroyed. Each year since 1996, Congress has renewed the Dickey-Wicker Amendment, named for its authors, Representatives Jay Dickey of Arkansas and Roger Wicker of Mississippi. Seven years after the Dickey-Wicker Amendment, Arkansas passed a law prohibiting the production of a living organism at any stage of development that is genetically virtually identical to an existing or previously existing human organism. The 2003 law also made human cloning a felony punishable by prison sentences of up to 10 years and fines up to $10,000. Even as state legislators were in the process of limiting stem cell research, the Arkansas Biosciences Institute (ABI) was engaged in efforts to increase biomedical research initiatives in the state.
The universities, the business community, and state legislators worked together to see ABI achieve its goal. In 2007, the legislature passed Act 695, the Newborn Umbilical Cord Blood Initiative Act, a public policy to promote research involving stem cells from a less controversial source, and the Arkansas Science and Technology Authority authorized the Arkansas Research Alliance to encourage university-based research and innovation in strategic focus areas, one of which was stem cell research.
The Laws
On March 24, 2003, Governor Mike Huckabee signed into law a bill to ban the cloning of humans for any purpose, including medical research. Although Democrats controlled both houses, the bill passed by a vote of 88–5 in the House and a vote of 34–0 in the Senate. The House rejected an amendment to permit human cloning for research. In 2007, the Newborn Umbilical Cord Blood Initiative Act passed both houses of the state legislature with equally strong bipartisan support and was signed by Governor Mike Beebe, a Democrat. Representative Jon Woods, one of the bill’s sponsors, said that he saw the cord blood bank as an issue that could unite Arkansans with different views of stem cell research and help boost Arkansas’s stem cell treatments and research.
Opponents of embryonic stem cell research called the cord blood legislation a pro-life solution to the stem cell debate. Critics of the state ban praised the new legislature for providing that some of the cord blood can be used for research. The legislation established a statewide cord blood banking network that aids in collecting and transporting donations. The network is housed at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS), which has one of the largest adult blood cell transplant centers in the country. The Cord Blood Bank of Arkansas opened in 2011.
Arkansas Biosciences Institute
The Tobacco Settlement Proceeds Act of 2000 created the Arkansas Biosciences Institute (ABI) in 2001 with five member institutions: Arkansas Children’s Hospital Research Institute; Arkansas State University (ASU); the University of Arkansas, Division of Agriculture; the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville; and the UAMS. The overarching goal of the partnership was to improve the health of Arkansans through agricultural and biomedical research initiatives. By 2011, when ABI celebrated its 10th anniversary, the $109 million in tobacco settlement funding received by ABI had generated more than $350 million in leveraged extramural funding from federal agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) in Little Rock is the member institution most directly concerned with stem cell research. The state’s largest public employer, with more than 10,000 employees, UAMS has an annual economic impact of almost $4 billion. It includes the colleges of medicine, nursing, pharmacy, health professions, public health, and graduate school and is also home to the Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute, of which the Myeloma Institute for Research and Therapy is a part.
The Arkansas Cancer Research Center opened in 1989, with the space evenly divided between research and patient care. The name was changed to the Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute in 2007 to honor the late Arkansas Lieutenant Governor Winthrop P. Rockefeller. The center operates one of the top peripheral blood stem cell transplantation clinics in the world. The transplant clinic offers autologous, allogeneic, and matched unrelated donor transplants, as well as outpatient transplant, stem cell selection, novel therapeutic, and gene therapy programs. Stem cell transplantation, a less invasive treatment than bone marrow transplant, is used with most patients. Although the highest percentage of patients receiving transplants are diagnosed with multiple myeloma, patients with other hematologic cancers as well as some solid organ tumors also receive transplants.
Founded by Bart Barlogie, the Myeloma Institute for Research and Therapy was part of the cancer center from the beginning. Barlogie, professor of medicine and pathology at UAMS and director of the Myeloma Institute, pioneered the use of tandem peripheral stem cell transplant for multiple myeloma. The first stem cell transplant to treat myeloma, a cancer of the blood’s plasma, at UAMS was conducted in 1989. In 2014, the Myeloma Institute is the largest center in the world devoted exclusively to clinical care for and research in multiple myeloma. More than 10,000 patients from every state in the United States and more than 50 foreign countries have received treatment at the institute, and more than 9,000 have received peripheral blood stem cell transplants. Barlogie has successfully secured National Cancer Institute funding for his translational research program project, Growth Control of Multiple Myeloma, for 20 consecutive years.
Arkansas Research Alliance
In 2007, the state legislature appropriated funds and the Arkansas Science and Technology Authority authorized the Arkansas Research Alliance (ARA) as a public–private partnership to invest in innovative research that also strengthened economic opportunity. In 2009, ARA began operating. The brainchild of Accelerate Arkansas, a private, volunteer network of state business leaders focused on promoting knowledge-based job growth, the ARA board includes some of Arkansas’s most prominent business leaders. To stimulate the desired commercially viable research, ARA instituted the ARA Scholars program. ARA recruits two scientists each year whose expertise falls within the strategic focus areas that hold the promise of commercialization. In 2014, ARA Scholars’ research projects included drug development, stem cell research, and cutting-edge membrane technology and purification processes.
One of the inaugural ARA Scholars is Daohong Zhou, an expert in cancer and stem cell research. Holder of the Winthrop P. Rockefeller Endowed Chair for Leukemia Research and the associate director for basic research at the Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute, Zhou focuses on radiation- and chemotherapy-induced stem cell injury as well as leukemia. He is also interested in novel strategies to promote ex vivo expansion of human hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) for transplantation. Zhou and fellow researchers founded the Arkansas Stem Cell Coalition in 2010 as a forum for developing collaborative and multidisciplinary research teams and as a means of fostering support for stem cell research from state and federal agencies and institutions and from the general public. The group also organized the Arkansas Conference on Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine in 2012 and 2013.
Wylene Rholetter
Auburn University
See Also: Blood Adult Stem Cell: Major Pathologies; Stem Cell Banking.
Further Readings
Carter, Mark. “State Hoping ARA Scholars Program Leads to Jobs.” Arkansas Business (August 22, 2011). http://www.arkansasbusiness.com/article/33724/state-hoping-ara-scholars-program-leads-to-jobs (Accessed May 2014).
Griggs, Ted. “Stem Cell
