Putting PET in the spotlight

PET (the Progress Educational Trust) does a great deal more than publish BioNews every week. The charity's work has been particularly busy lately, and so we thought we'd update you on some of our recent activities.

Access to fertility treatment

The PET team, with the help of some of our amazing volunteers, has produced a Fertility Policy Tracker for England. This provides headline information about the policies of Integrated Care Boards, and the access criteria people have to meet in order to be eligible for NHS-funded treatment. Please get in touch if you can help us spread the word about this free resource, which was kindly sponsored by Ferring. The latest data published by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority shows a fall in NHS-funded treatment in England, something I have been busy commenting on in the media.

Policy work

PET, in partnership with Cambridge Reproduction, has published a new Code of Practice to govern the use of stem-cell based embryo models (SCBEMs) in research. This is the result of more than a year of work in which my colleague Sandy Starr was heavily involved. Sandy also gave a presentation about the Code at the International Society for Stem Cell Research annual conference in Hamburg, Germany, last week. Download the Code here, read a BioNews article by the experts that drafted the Code here, and read Sandy and others discussing the Code in Nature News here.

Media

Besides Nature News, PET has been quoted in a wide range of media outlets, including UK newspapers the Evening Standard, the Guardian, the Independent, the Mail, the Telegraph and the Times. I have also been interviewed on BBC News, and on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4.

Science Museum

PET had an exhibition stand at the Science Museum in London, where my colleagues Amanda Cooney and Jen Willows – together with our brilliant volunteers – discussed the 14-day limit on human embryo research, and asked museum visitors for their perspectives on whether or not this limit should be extended. Meanwhile, Sandy was in a different part of the Science Museum discussing SCBEMs and the new Code of Practice, as part of a panel discussion chaired by the acclaimed science writer Dr Philip Ball, who is also a judge of the BioNews Writing Prize. PET will be running a further activity at the Science Museum for Science Lates on 11 September.

Fertility treatment add-ons

PET was proud to partner with Dr Manuela Perrotta of Queen Mary University of London, on a project entitled 'Building Bridges Between Fertility Patients, Clinics and Regulators: A Collaborative Approach'. PET facilitated a series of stakeholder workshops for this projects, and produced an event to showcase the project findings (you can listen to that discussion on our podcast here). The project has resulted in an interactive toolkit and several research digests, addressing key issues related to the proliferation of fertility treatment add-ons. All of these documents can be downloaded here.

BioNews is 25 this year

In addition to holding the inaugural Marcus Pembrey BioNews Writing Competition, we have been publishing a series of 'listicles'. These are themed lists of articles on particular topics from our extensive 25-year archive, and this content is only available to subscribers. So if you don't wish to miss out, make sure you've subscribed to the BioNews email newsletter here.

A first for BioNews in this birthday year is its TV debut! Those of you who have watched 'The Man with 1000 Kids' on Netflix may have spotted the BioNews website making a cameo appearance on someone's computer screen. In the second episode of the series, the camera focused on this article by Jen Willows, about a prolific Dutch sperm donor.

Engagements

In addition to all this, we've also been out and about at many different events. You can always keep up to date with our activities on the Engagement page of our website.

Challenges

One of the biggest challenges for the PET team this year has been the lack of a shared office space. Our modest office, with its inadequate roof and brickwork, became unusable in October last year when a large amount of water leaked in. The landlord still hasn't completed the repairs, but the end seems to be in sight, and (all being well) we hope to be back on Gray's Inn Road at the beginning of August.

The biggest challenge, however, has been fundraising. Several of PET's longstanding revenue streams stopped without notice at the start of this financial year, leaving us with a shortfall in our budget.

We are therefore urging all our readers to become Friends of PET by making a donation of a few pounds each month to help us fill the gap.

You can also help us to raise much-needed funds at no extra cost to yourself. When shopping online, please try visiting Easyfundraising first – more than 4000 shops and websites will donate to us for free when you shop online with them. Sign up here to support us via this service.

Alternatively, before you start shopping on Amazon, access Amazon via this link, or else via the Amazon logo on the right-hand side of the PET website. We receive a small percentage of your spend from Amazon if you do this.

Thanks for your support. We appreciate it, now more than ever.