West Virginia

ON JULY 18, 2006, the U.S. Senate convened to vote on a proposed bill (H.R.810) that would amend the Public Health Service Act and provide federal funding for research on human embryonic stem cells. This bill was passed by the Senate but was later vetoed by President George W Bush. The two West Virginia Senators, Democrats Robert C. Byrd and Jay Rockefeller, both voted in support of the bill.

As of early 2008, the only hospital offering blood stem cell transplants for therapeutics in the state of West Virginia was the West Virginia University Hospital System, under the leadership of Solveig G. Ericson, M.D., Ph.D. Ericson is the director of the Blood and Marrow Transplant and Hématologie Malignancy Program. This program offers blood stem cell transplants, clinical trials, and access to both national and international stem cell registries.

At the West Virginia University School of Medicine, Sreekumar Othumpangat, Ph.D., working in the laboratories of Laura Gibson, Ph.D., and Giovanni Piedimonte, M.D., in the Department of Pediatrics, studies embryonic stem cell differentiation.

In the Division of Exercise Physiology, Ming Pei, Ph.D., is the director of the Tissue Engineering Laboratory; he works to study how synovium—derived stem cells could be a starting point for engineering of new tissue to repair damaged knee joints. The synovium is a soft tissue in the joints that lines the noncartilaginous regions. Pei is also investigating the use of small intestinally derived stem cells and mesenchymal stem cells for this same purpose. He is funded by a number of sources, including the National Institutes of Health.