Human organs and tissues differ in regard to their clinical and research uses and
the regulatory legislation controlling their use. Organs such as livers and hearts
are usually taken from donors who are brain-dead; in addition, kidneys can also come
from live volunteers. Organs decay rapidly and need to be transplanted quickly. Surgeons
and coordination teams in transplantation centres control the procurement, while dedicated
national and international organisations facilitate their allocation.
Human tissues such as bone, skin and heart valves are usually removed from cadavers
in hospitals, morgues or even funeral homes and, unlike organs, can be stored—sometimes
for years—in tissue banks. These tissues can be used in numerous recipients as and
when they are needed. In the early days of human tissue banking, not-for-profit banks,
mostly located in hospitals, dominated the field. The tissues they stored—heart valves
and skin, for example—saved many lives.
Human tissues for research are said to be worth more than diamonds, being valued at
US$500/g.
Since the 1980s, the demand for human tissues has increased dramatically. The first
tissue in significant demand was human bone for use in allografts in orthopaedic surgery.
In the 1990s, the emerging field of regenerative medicine, which generates human tissue-engineered
products (hTEPs), began to require access to human tissues. Eventually, pharmaceutical
companies began using human tissue instead of animals in the early stages of medical
product testing. Human tissues for research are said to be worth more than diamonds,
being valued at US$500/g.
Inevitably, commercial tissue banks were set up to capitalise on this demand, starting
in the USA. Most US tissue bank companies obtain their material through Willed Body
Donation programs, run by the bank itself or through offshoots. They are allowed to
charge processors and distributors “reasonable fees” for the procurement of cadaver
tissue—harvesting, transportation, refrigeration and so on—rather than charging money
for the donated tissue itself, as it is illegal in most countries to buy and sell
human organs or tissues that are donated for free. Next, tissue processors and distributors
can also charge “reasonable fees” for their contributions: processing, packaging,
distribution, marketing and so on. Unfortunately, the term “reasonable fee” has never
been defined and this loophole is now being exploited to turn altruistic donations
into profits. International tissue brokers and stock market listed tissue processors
and distributors are emerging, with far-reaching consequences for the allocation of
human tissues.
… the term “reasonable fee” has never been defined and this loophole is now being
exploited to turn altruistic donations into profits
In contrast to the USA, Europe initially adopted a more restrictive attitude. Most
of Europe's tissue banking activity remains at hospital tissue banks, while some specialised
activities, such as tissue engineering, are outsourced to biotechnology companies.
This situation has created tension between the altruistic principles of hospital tissue
banks and industry's profit-oriented principles. Meanwhile, industry lobbying and
the political desire to promote the growth of biotechnology markets and jobs have
led to increasingly business-oriented legislation controlling human tissue handling
in the EU. This shift has now gone so far that in some legislations, the risk arises
that the interests of industry could take precedence over the interests of patients
and research.
The legal framework for tissue donation, banking and usage in the EU is comprised
of three EC Directives: the parent Directive 2004/23/EC, which provides the framework
legislation, and two technical Directives, 2006/17/EC and 2006/86/EC, which give detailed
requirements. In 2008, the Advanced Therapy Medicinal Product (ATMP) Regulation (EC)
No 1394/2007, which covers hTEPs among other things, came into force. Because public
health matters fall under the competence of the EU Member States, the Directorate
General Enterprise of the European Commission invoked the “common safety concerns
in public health” clause, which falls under the auspices of the EC, to create a regulatory
environment that would facilitate a market for hTEPs. Pharmaceutical industry standards,
such as good manufacturing practice (GMP) and marketing authorisation, were imposed
upon the predominantly hospital-based human tissue transplantation field. In addition,
the legal concept of “Tissue Establishment” was introduced, which expands on the conventional
concept of a tissue bank. Companies with an accreditation as a Tissue Establishment
would thereby obtain direct access to human tissues and cells. These regulations have
established a crucial legal difference between organs and tissues: human tissues are
legally tradable goods in a global market.
This commercialisation of human tissues raises several ethical and public health issues.
Although acknowledging the legitimacy of these concerns, the EC invoked the principle
of subsidiarity—whereby the EU only takes action in areas, which fall within its exclusive
competence—to relegate ethical and public health issues to the Member States. The
regulation of hTEPs prepared on a non-routine basis and used within the same EU Member
State in a hospital under the exclusive responsibility of a medical practitioner (referred
to as the “Hospital Exemption” rule) was also delegated to national-level actors.
As a consequence, some member states have, through national legislation, shifted the
focus of tissue banking from public-health-oriented public tissue banks to profit-oriented
companies. We will explain here how this is taking place in Belgium under the radar
of public attention.
Belgium is considered to have one of the best healthcare systems in Europe. It is
sponsored by the state and provided by a mixture of state-owned and non-profit hospitals.
The costs for patients are partially or fully covered by a health insurance fund and
the government sets reimbursement prices. As mandated by the EU, Belgium has tried
to address some ethical and public health issues in its implementation of the EC's
Tissue and Cell Directives. The “Act regarding the procurement and use of human body
material destined for human medical applications or for scientific research purposes”
was adopted on 19 December 2008 and entered into force on 1 December 2009. It defines
“human body material” as “any biological body material, including human tissues and
cells, gametes, embryos and foetuses, as well as substances extracted there from,
whatever the degree to which they have been processed”. The law also introduced four
types of “Tissue Establishments”: Banks for Human Body Material, Intermediate Structures,
Production Establishments and Biobanks. These “Tissue Establishments” need to be accredited
and their activities and goals must be approved by an ethics committee.
According to the Act, human body material can only be procured by medical doctors
in recognised hospitals and collected by a Bank for Human Body Material, which must
be operated by a certified hospital. From then on, the “human body material manager”—a
medical doctor affiliated to the bank—is responsible for the use of the material,
including the allocation to a patient or Tissue Establishment. Banks for Human Body
Material should be set up as not-for-profit establishments. An Intermediate Structure
is only entitled to process, preserve, store and distribute human body material for
further use in collaboration with a Bank for Human Body Material. Production Establishments
can perform all operations, including production of ATMPs, provided such use is exclusively
for autologous purposes. Commercial companies can obtain Intermediate Structure and/or
Production Establishment licenses in Belgium. The import and export of human body
material are restricted to Banks for Human Body Material and Production Establishments.
The exact role of Biobanks still needs to be clarified, but basically they will collect,
process, preserve, store and distribute human body material for scientific research
only.
While human tissue itself cannot have human dignity, human dignity is nevertheless
concerned when human tissue is involved
In summary, industry has gained access to autologous starting materials, but access
to and the future use of allogeneic tissues and cells is controlled by not-for-profit
hospital-operated Banks for Human Body Material. It is forbidden to store human body
material for future autologous use, unless it can be used to treat a realistically
impending pathology, or if the material is put at the disposal of the entire community.
The prices for human tissue and cell “products” and for some processes are fixed by
Ministerial Decree. These prices basically cover the costs of processing and leave
no room for unreasonable profits, thereby inherently preserving the not-for-profit
character of these activities.
The ATMP “Hospital Exemption” rule mentioned above, that is the regime pertaining
to ATMPs prepared on a non-routine basis and used in a hospital within the same EU
Member State under the exclusive responsibility of a medical practitioner, is not
resolved yet and is the subject of fierce debate. More than 20 “products” produced
by nine Belgian hospital Banks for Human Body Material are in fact ATMPs—we refer
to them as “cloaked” ATMPs—whereas only a handful of ATMPs are produced by three Belgian
companies. Only one of these commercial ATMPs, ChondroCelect®—autologous chondrocyte
cultures for symptomatic cartilage lesions in the knee—is actually on the market.
It is the only hTEP-ATMP that has obtained centralised European Marketing Authorisation
since the implementation of the ATMP Regulation in 2008.
Differences in consent to tissue donation, such as opting-in versus opting-out, create
opportunities for exploitation by companies that lack ethical responsibility
The hospital-based Banks for Human Body Material were notified by the Belgian Federal
Agency for Medicines and Health Products that their products would fall under the
definition of an ATMP and that the administration of these products to patients, as
had previously occurred, would no longer be allowed after 30 December 2012. Since
then, the status of these now “uncloaked” ATMPs has been contentious and their future
remains uncertain. Some of the products, such as keratinocytes for severely burnt
patients, have been applied to thousands of patients since the 1980s, and none of
the numerous inspections over the years have ever revealed significant quality or
safety issues. When looking at these developments, three questions come to mind: how
can “products” that are produced and used in non-profit hospitals, and which originate
from altruistic donations, become commercial medicinal products? Does it make sense
to implement the Hospital Exemption rule if that rule de facto caters for the majority
of products? And why are products that were developed 25 years ago suddenly called
“advanced” or “innovative”?
Some of the measures introduced by Belgian legislators to prevent excesses quickly
turned out to be futile. By way of example, a private umbilical cord blood bank—such
banks have been criticised for nurturing false hopes among customers—found a way to
bypass Belgian law and obtained a license to operate (http://www.journalismfund.eu/workinggrant/international-offensive-cord-blood-banking).
At the same time, industry has started lobbying Belgian policymakers for better access
to tissue material. The Commission on Social Affairs of the Belgian Senate set up
a working group to evaluate the “opportunities and challenges associated with innovative
therapies”. The working group invited the three Belgian commercial Production Establishments
involved in ATMP production, several professional trade associations and a few start-up
companies to join its evaluation. However, the nine accredited hospital counterparts
that are responsible for more than 20 formerly cloaked ATMPs, and the hospital Banks
for Human Body Material, which provide the starting materials for cell and tissue-based
therapies, were not invited.
According to their 2013 report, the working group identified three tissue bank-related
issues that allegedly hamper the ability of companies to develop and commercialise
innovative hTEP-ATMPs: an insufficient number of accredited public Banks for Human
Body Material to ensure a sufficient supply of starting materials and the import and
export of finished products; a lack of encouragement for Banks for Human Body Material
to collaborate with companies that produce hTEPs; and the production of hTEPs must
be performed in accordance with GMP standards, which the working group found to be
inconsistent with the purpose of Banks for Human Body Material. However, according
to an expert from the Belgian Ministry of Public Health, it has not been proved that
Banks for Human Body Material are disinclined to provide human body material to the
tissue engineering industry [1]. Indeed, had representatives of the Banks for Human
Body Material been invited to the meetings of the working group, they would have argued
against all three findings.
Regarding the first issue, the allegedly insufficient number of accredited public
Banks for Human Body Material, we refer to the list of accredited Tissue Establishments
published by the Belgian authorities (http://www.fagg-afmps.be/nl/binaries/Lijst%20MLM%20141016_tcm290-28032.pdf;
http://www.fagg-afmps.be/fr/binaries/Liste%20MCH%20141016_tcm291-28032.pdf). According
to this list (updated 16 October 2014), no less than 67 accreditations were issued
(one accreditation for each tissue type), not including banks for human reproductive
tissue. For a country of 11 million inhabitants, this is one of the highest concentrations
of Banks for Human Body Material among all EU Member States.
Regarding the working group's second finding, the supposed lack of encouragement of
the Banks for Human Body Material to collaborate with companies, the authors know
of only three requests for collaboration between a company and a Bank for Human Body
Material. One of them led to the development of the previously mentioned ATMP ChondroCelect®.
Another request involves haematopoietic stem cells and the collaboration is still
ongoing. A third public–private partnership involved keratinocytes and lasted for
more than 10 years before both partners cancelled it a decade ago, owing to the introduction
of business practices that were not compatible with the bank's mission statement:
sales representatives had influenced physicians' choices, keratinocytes were offered
to privately insured patients in less regulated or emerging markets, and a patent
was applied for to cover the possible cosmetic use of human keratinocyte products.
Successful collaborations between Intermediate Structures and Banks for Human Body
Material are certainly possible and desirable, but in order to achieve this goal,
Banks for Human Body Material should first of all be recognised as full partners and
stakeholders.
If Belgian citizens were to suspect that donated tissues become part and parcel of
profit-maximizing activities, they might be more likely to exercise their right to
opt-out
What about the third claim that GMP standards are inconsistent with the purpose of
Banks for Human Body Material? As a matter of fact, GMP standards might not be consistent
with the tissue transplantation field as a whole, but since they were imposed, hospital
banks cannot ignore them. Even though not taken into account by EU policymakers [2],
the main purpose of public hospital banks has always been to provide quality grafts
for therapeutic use. Belgian Banks for Human Body Material have already invested heavily
in clean room facilities and are getting ready to produce hTEPs in compliance with
GMP requirements, even though there is no evidence that these investments will actually
result in any significant improvement to the quality or safety of their grafts.
There is a risk that the final destination of the donated human body material may
partly be determined by differences in financial compensation
The working group's report led to the submission, on 21 January 2014, of a bill to
amend the Act of 2008 on the procurement and use of human body material [3]. This
bill, if enacted, would allow Production Establishments to produce both autologous
and allogeneic human tissue and cell products. It would give industry access to autologous
and allogeneic human body material and would provide industry with full control over
its use, without the need to collaborate with a Bank for Human Body Material. Belgian
policymakers will now need to decide which entities will control the access to and
use of donated tissue material. The problem, however, is that the current actors in
the field have, to greater or lesser extent, conflicting interest. The interests of
the general public, hospitals and industry are not always in line with each other.
Article 21 of the 1997 Council of Europe Convention of Human Rights and BioMedicine
provides that it is not permissible for the human body or its parts as such to give
rise to profits. This principle is based on the need to protect human dignity and
to ensure that persons can be the authors of their own lives. With the advent of the
biotechnological era, human dignity has been attributed an additional function—“human
dignity as a constraint”—to prohibit practices because they compromise the intrinsic
worth of persons and the integrity of the human species. These include human reproductive
cloning, germ line intervention, creation of human chimeras, prenatal sex selection,
and the commercialisation of the human body and its parts as such [4]. It does not,
however, prevent specific commercial activities, such as the patenting of human body
material in isolated, purified or slightly modified form.
Concerning post-mortem procurement of human body material for medical applications
or for scientific research, the Act of 2008 extends the presumed consent regime that
governs cadaveric organ transplantation in Belgium: first, from post-mortem removal
of organs to post-mortem removal of any biological material that falls under the scope
of this Act, and secondly, an extension from post-mortem removal for therapeutic purposes
to post-mortem removal for research purposes. In other words, the Belgian law equates
the absence of any registered objection to post-mortem removal of organs for transplantation
with the absence of any objection to post-mortem removal of any body material for
any purpose. No efforts have been made to inform the public of this new legal regime
for the post-mortem procurement of body material. While human tissue itself cannot
have human dignity, human dignity is nevertheless concerned when human tissue is involved.
For some stakeholders, this implies that tissues originating from an altruistic donation
should not be transformed into commercial products and should only be handled by non-profit-making
tissue banks. In reality, private companies process or engineer donated human tissues
and cells into more valuable medicinal products, which often requires extensive research
and investments, which, it is argued, justifies the commercialisation of the resulting
products. This is a dilemma, since hTEPs now consist of a non-commercialisable part
(human body material) and a commercialisable part (technological processing). A possible
solution would be to allow the commercialisation of human body material by companies
that act in good faith—reflected in reasonable processing fees and approval from an
ethics committee—and that produce beneficial therapeutic products.
Public health is not a key priority for private companies: their primary obligation
is to maximise profits for their shareholders and investors. For human tissue products,
this means that companies need to get access to starting materials and at low cost.
Differences in consent to tissue donation, such as opting in versus opting out, create
opportunities for exploitation by companies that lack ethical responsibility. Countries
such as Belgium, which have an “opt-out” rule or presumed consent regime, are therefore
interesting for brokers and corporate actors to get access to human tissue material
for processing into highly profitable products. In this way, the values of solidarity
and the common good that are supposed to underlie presumed consent are increasingly
being eroded.
If everybody were charging “reasonable” fees, there would not be significant price
variations for the same product. Instead, a wide variation in prices exists, ranging
from hundreds to thousands of dollars for the same product. In sports medicine, tendon
and bone allografts, for instance, fetch higher prices in areas with a flourishing
sports culture than tendon and bone products for general orthopaedics. Average human
cell and tissue product prices are almost five times higher in the USA than in Belgium
[5]. The Belgian reimbursement price for ChondroCelect® is almost ten times higher
than for the conventional non-ATMP analogues produced by two Belgian hospital Banks
for Human Body Material. Due to the high costs of ChondroCelect®, reimbursement is
now restricted to patients younger than 50 years.
In addition, some companies in the tissue engineering field cater to cosmetics rather
than medical products. A striking example is the processing of human skin, the gold
standard for the treatment of severe burns, into cosmetic products without medical
indication, such as penis widening or lip enhancements, which fetch much higher prices
than analogues for burn treatments. US burn centres were reportedly struggling to
obtain skin because local tissue banks are committing all their donated skin to firms
that market products for plastic and cosmetic surgery [6].
Such practices give rise to further questions. Tissue Establishments have a responsibility
towards donors and donor families. In the USA, research has shown that donors wish
that their donations result in products that meet medical needs or support research
or medical education [6]. Donors and their families also expect their tissue to be
treated with respect. However, human body material is increasingly viewed as a marketable
commodity.
If Belgian citizens were to suspect that donated tissues become part and parcel of
profit-maximising activities, they might be more likely to exercise their right to
opt-out. This would put Belgium's successful opt-out donation system for organs, tissues
and cells for transplantation in jeopardy because the current opt-out registers do
not allow a person to differentiate between the use of their organs and that of any
other body material. Even if people became aware of the Act of 2008, their only choice
is between opting out of all types of donations, including for non-commercial organ
transplantation, or opting out of none.
Hospital-based Tissue Establishments must be prepared to deliver human tissue with
the required level of quality and safety, but also respect and protect the freedom
of choice, the rights and health of the donors, and prioritise the collection and
use of human body material according to therapeutic and scientific relevance. In hematopoietic
progenitor cell (HPC) transplantation, international standards are being designed
to protect donor safety, to prevent unnecessary pressure on the donor and to ensure
an unbiased information process. These standards could be adapted to all types of
healthy volunteer donations. A failure to regulate will increase the risk of unethical
trade practices, which are usually associated with significant risks to donor and
recipient safety and could negatively impact established not-for-profit therapeutic
applications.
Finally, we suspect that the current Belgian regulatory framework will give rise to
a competition between tissue banks and companies for access to limited and precious
human cells and tissues. There is a risk that the final destination of the donated
human body material may partly be determined by differences in financial compensation.
The Belgian healthcare system has traditionally been patient driven and based on the
principles of human dignity, equity of access, quality and solidarity. These principles
are not compatible with uncontrolled commercialisation of human tissues and cells.
As explained above, the Belgian Act of 2008 has resulted in a twofold extension of
the presumed consent from post-mortem removal of organs to post-mortem removal of
any human body material and from post-mortem removal for transplantation to post-mortem
removal for research purposes. In addition, a new bill, which is currently under consideration
in the Belgian parliament to amend the Act of 2008, would hand over a significant
measure of control of the tissue transplantation field to industry. Belgian citizens
are unaware of this.
Ideally, the procurement and allocation of human tissues and cells should be controlled
and facilitated by (inter)national non-profit organisations, comparable to organ donation
and transplantation foundations such as Eurotransplant and Swiss Transplant. An excessive
commercialisation of human body material could lead to a loss of trust in the transplantation
field and could put at risk the successful “opting out” or “presumed consent” donation
systems in some EU Member States. Policymakers seem enamoured by the methods and rhetoric
of industry, leading them to neglect the interests of donors and their families and
eroding the public values underlying the healthcare system.