Stanford Stem Cell Product, Delayed for More than a Decade, to be Tested Again
By Lisa M. Krieger,
San Jose Mercury News
| 06. 14. 2015
STANFORD -- In the 1990s, Stanford's Irv Weissman created a unique way to grow and deliver blood stem cells to desperate patients with aggressive cancers, boosting survival rates.
But then the discovery itself died -- a victim of the heartbreaking economics of commercial stem-cell development, where the long and rocky road of research, especially in the field of "personalized medicine," often discourages investment.
Now, 10 years after the technique's sale and then abandonment by a biotech company, it is back in Weissman's hands. The goal, he said, is to finally resume his research to prove, once and for all, its effectiveness in patients with no other hope.
"I am frustrated by more than a decade of delay," said Weissman, who codirects the Stanford Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine. "But I'm delighted that medical need, rather than rapid profits, is now the primary criterion to translate our stem cell discoveries."
Weissman's discovery was a method to isolate, purify and transplant cells, called blood-forming stem cells. These are the cells deep in the marrow of our bones that generate...
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 Matthew Rozsa, Salon | 09.15.2024
When a person with a uterus decides to freeze their eggs, any number of things can go wrong. Ice crystal can form, killing an otherwise viable ovum. A fertilized egg may fail to properly implant, or the egg may...
By Sarah Kliff, The New York Times | 09.09.2024
Image by Stephen Andrews from Unsplash
Yale agreed on Monday to pay dozens of patients who had filed lawsuits claiming that they had endured excruciatingly painful egg retrieval procedures after a nurse at its fertility clinic secretly swapped their anesthesia...
By Ari Schulman, The New York Times | 09.09.2024
There was immediate backlash when Alabama’s Supreme Court ruled in February that embryos created through in vitro fertilization qualified as children under the state’s wrongful death law. But it was a backlash as much from the right as from the...