Article preview from Start-Up - November, 2012
California’s stem cell agency still has nearly two billion dollars to grant. But with recent stem cell breakthroughs slow to translate, will venture backers and drug firms help build the ecosystem California citizens imagined in 2004 when they voted to make the state a beacon for the science?
Article preview from Start-Up - November, 2012
The award of this year’s Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine to two stem-cell researchers injected no small amount of pride into the still-nascent field, but the prize also underlines the halting progress so far translating the research into therapies.
The slow pace is noticeable in the venture dollars invested in the sector in recent years, and in the lack of dealmaking as well, while the pace of scientific discovery has been anything but slow. As the country last decade fiercely debated the ethics of using pluripotent human embryonic stem cells to explore how the body differentiates into myriad cell types – and the possibilities of reprogramming those cells to develop therapies – others were racing to create pluripotent cells without using embryos. These induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells, are in essence evolution run backwards: differentiated cells treated with growth factors, chemicals, or both, to return them to a pluripotent state, at which point they can be redifferentiated.
Nobel winner Shinya Yamanaka, MD, PhD, was the first to show that four transcription factors could reprogram a cell. Yamanaka himself admits his prize-winning work has catching up to do, in a sense. In an appearance in October at the University of California, San Francisco, to celebrate the Nobel he and British pioneer Sir John Gurdon shared, Yamanaka said, “Our hope is to use iPS [as cellular therapies] instead of embryonic stem [ES] cells one day but it’s too early. Human ES cells are the gold standard.”
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