Biotech Stem Cell Spin

Like politicians, pundits, and advocates, biotech entrepreneurs are also contemplating how to react to the recent advances in deriving stem cells from ordinary skin cells - particularly if the developments make their products less appealing. NeoStem was an already dubious company, founded by a Long Island "bagel baron," which stores adult bone marrow stem cells for a mere $7,500 fee. As with some other start ups, this one attempts to capitalize on stem cell hype.

Fortunately, some observers are not mincing words. Thomas Murray of the Hastings Center said, "The kindest thing one can say about this kind of activity is that it may not harm anyone. There is, at best, a faint prospect that it will benefit anyone except the people collecting the fees." I doubt that is reassuring to its investors, who have sunk in more than $10 million only to watch the company's stock lose 80% of its value in the last year.

The company's founder is trying to make PR lemonade out of the scientific lemons which recently made his services even less relevant: "In our opinion ... [the recent findings are] helpful in the sense that it's important to be able to move the entire stem cell field forward."

That's also the motivation behind a press release sent by Cascade Life Sciences, whose only asset appears to be a license to use new primate cloning and stem cell techniques. While those briefly seemed like a critical development, induced pluripotent stem cells (IPs) are patient-specific cells, and have already been obtained from humans without the need for eggs or cloning. Not surprisingly, Cascade's press statement tries to ride coattails by using language that brings to mind IPs instead of cloning:

Dr. Shoukhrat Mitalipov, Ph.D., and Oregon Health & Science University have made a major breakthrough in the reprogramming of primate skin cells into stem cells....

Notably, both approaches are capable of generating pluripotent embryonic stem cells without the use or need for fertilized embryos as a starting material. [italics mine]

Calling somatic cell nuclear transfer a method of reprogramming skin cells without a fertilized embryo, while technically accurate, is quite a rhetorical stretch. But the statement even attempts to recast cloning-based stem cell research, which has largely been unsuccessful after years of work, as superior to IPs:

Not only do we no longer need embryos as a starting material, the technology appears to address the issue of transplant rejection in the therapeutic setting and, moreover, does not require the use of retroviral transvection of additional DNA, such as transgenes, oncogenes, etc., to create pluripotent stem cells

Obviously, pointing out the shortcomings of a more successful competitor does not make cloning-based stem cell treatments any closer to reality.