Live Action News recently reported about how the FDA is contracting with Advanced Bioscience Resources (ABR) to obtain “fresh human tissues” — aborted fetal body parts — “for implantation into severely immune-compromised mice to create chimeric animals that have a human immune system.” ABR’s history with fetal tissue research goes back years. According to the Center for Medical Progress, ABR is “the largest and oldest fetal tissue seller in the U.S.” It was founded in 1989, and is the primary supplier of fetal tissue for the U.S. government. And it has paid numerous abortion facilities a great deal of money for this tissue — including a number of Planned Parenthood centers.
The stunning graphic below from the House Select Investigative Panel report summarizes known ABR payments to various Planned Parenthood facilities for fetal tissue — totaling more than $350,000 over the course of six years, from 2010 to 2015:
ABR known payments to Planned Parenthood for fetal tissue (Image credit: Congressional report)
According to a 2015 report from Politico:
The Food and Drug Administration has also paid about $73,000 to the company since 2009… mostly for liver and thymus tissue that are used largely to develop a human-like immune system in mice…. The NIH, with a $30 billion budget for research nationwide, funded about $76 million in dozens of fetal tissue projects in 2014.
FDA Chimeric fetal tissue research
The FDA has a dozen contracts with ABR for various items, including lab equipment and supplies, according to the General Services Administration’s Federal Procurement Data System. Online records at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) indicate ABR is regularly granted federal dollars for various projects.
READ: FDA buys ‘fresh’ aborted body parts from company referred for criminal charges
The 2015 Congressional investigation regarding the illegal sale of fetal body parts, following undercover videos released by CMP, led to a report. In this report, quoted below, it was revealed that ABR had been contracting with universities and abortion facilities for years:
- Before [founder and CEO Cate Dyer] began StemExpress, she worked for Advanced Bioscience Resources, Inc. (ABR)
- The University of Minnesota (UM)… obtains fetal tissue from procurement companies—in this case, Advanced Bioscience Resources (ABR) and StemExpress—in addition to an area clinic.
- The University of Wisconsin, School of Medicine and Public Health (UW SMPH)… more recently obtained fetal tissue for research from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, UW, and ABR.
- Colorado State University (CSU)… receives a significant amount in federal grants and obtains much of its fetal tissue from ABR and StemExpress. Between 2010 and 2015, CSU received seven NIH grants to support their projects using fetal tissue, at a taxpayer expense of $3.5 million.
- According to productions made by 25 clinics from which ABR has received fetal tissue, ABR paid them a total of $1,002,147 from 2010 to 2015…. The chart below shows ABR facility fee payments from 2010 through 2015 to the abortion clinics from which it obtained fetal tissue:
ABRs abortion clinic facility fees 2010 to 2015 (Image credit” Select Panel investigation of fetal tissue)
The panel then detailed ABR’s 2015 fetal parts sales to its top five customers:
ABR 2015 Fetal Sales to Top 5 Customers Product and Totals (Image credit: Congressional Investigation)
In a letter from Rep. Marsha Blackburn to the then-District Attorney of Riverside, California, the Congresswoman detailed ABR’s relationship with Planned Parenthood:
ABRs interactions with Planned Parenthood fetal tissue (Image credit: Letter from Rep. Marsha Blackburn)
In 2016, Houston attorney Briscoe Cain claimed he found evidence of four Texas medical schools purchasing fetal tissue from ABR. Invoices from to one of the schools, given to KFOX14 Investigates and reported by CBS4, show the school paid at least $4,000-$5,000 for fetal parts including livers, spleens and thymuses.
ABR invoices for fetal tissue to Texas Universities
ABR invoices for fetal parts to Texas Universities
“The research being done is humanized mice. Scientists inject the mouse with fetal tissue so the mouse is genetically altered to accept the graphing of human tissue,” Cain said at the time.
In 2011, the University of Minnesota contracted with ABR for “human fetal pancreas tissue” between 16-24 weeks.
ABR contract with U of Minnesota for fetal tissue 2011
In 2000, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) was tasked to study “the involvement of federal agencies under the jurisdiction of the Senate Committee on Appropriations, Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education in the acquisition of human fetal tissue for biomedical research.” The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) told GAO that “NIH is the only federal agency under the Labor, HHS, and Education Subcommittee’s jurisdiction that sponsors research using human fetal tissue.” But Live Action previously showed that the EPA used aborted fetal tissue for research in the 1970’s.
According to that report, NIH sponsored three central human fetal tissue supply organizations:
- The Birth Defects Laboratory at the University of Washington, which distributed 2,869 human fetal tissue samples and collected $52,035 in fees directly from researchers in fiscal year 1999.
- The Brain and Tissue Banks for Developmental Disorders at the University of Maryland and the University of Miami School of Medicine/Children’s Hospital of Orange County, primarily to serve as suppliers of human nonfetal tissue…. The University of Maryland Bank provided 195 human fetal tissue samples to investigators in fiscal year 1999, and the University of Miami Bank provided approximately 40 samples between March 1 and August 31, 1999.
GAO states that researchers also obtained human fetal tissue from private organizations that did not directly receive federal funds, including ABR.
