Geron Quits the Embryonic Stem Cell Industry
By Pete Shanks
| 11. 16. 2011
Geron has quit on embryonic stem cells. The company is abandoning
its world-leading clinical trial, aimed at using stem cells to treat
people paralyzed with spinal-cord injuries. It is laying off more than a third of its staff, and is writing off about $8 million. It has also repaid
the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) a loan of more
than $6 million, plus interest. Geron will continue to monitor the four
patients currently enrolled in the phase 1 clinical trial, and says it
is looking for another company to take it over.
The decision to terminate the trial seems to be all business, a
departure from past practices that seemed motivated more by hype and
wishful thinking. Geron's stock has been plummeting (down from $6.34 to $1.60
over the year), and new management is conducting triage. The ESC trial
is only in phase 1, a safety trial, in which severely injured patients
receive low doses of treatments that are frankly unlikely to do much
good; the point is to ensure that they do no harm. Results from that...
Related Articles
By Annalee Armstrong, BioSpace | 09.11.2024
Complex gene therapies are starting to hit the market but all have faced the same reality: a tepid reception from the healthcare system and a cloudy path to profitability.
It can take about a year for a patient to go...
By Julia Brown, The Conversation | 08.16.2024
With their primary goal to advance scientific knowledge, most scientists are not trained or incentivized to think through the societal implications of the technologies they are developing. Even in genomic medicine, which is geared toward benefiting future patients, time and...
By Smriti Mallapaty, Nature | 09.11.2024
Under his microscope, Jun Wu could see several tiny spheres, each less than 1 millimetre wide. They looked just like human embryos: a dark cluster of cells surrounded by a cavity, and then another ring of cells.
But Wu, a...
By Antonio Regalado, MIT Technology Review | 08.22.2024
In 2016, I attended a large meeting of journalists in Washington, DC. The keynote speaker was Jennifer Doudna, who just a few years before had co-invented CRISPR, a revolutionary method of changing genes that was sweeping across biology labs because...