An Embryonic Stem Cell Fade

They can’t blame Bush for this one: A Singapore company that made a big splash when it announced it would soon be offering ES cell therapies to human patients—has backed off. From the story in Science July 2007: Vol. 317. no. 5836, p. 305 (no link):

In a sign that hopes for quick medical benefits from stem cells are fading, ES Cell International (ESI)—a company established with fanfare in Singapore 7 years ago—is halting work on human embryonic stem (hES) cell therapies. Investors lost interest because “the likelihood of having products in the clinic in the short term was vanishingly small,” says Alan Colman, a stem cell pioneer who until last month was ESI’s chief executive. ESI’s setback may dampen investors’ enthusiasm for stem cell therapies, says Robert Lanza, vice president for R&D at Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Massachusetts: “What the field badly needs is one or two success stories.”
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The company was attempting to turn hES cells into insulin-producing cells to treat diabetes and cardiac muscle cells to counter congestive heart failure. Both conditions represent major markets with unmet clinical needs, but making well-functioning insulin-producing cells “proved really difficult,” Colman says. Both envisioned therapies would need at least a billion cells for each human dose. Producing such numbers at the required purity “becomes very expensive,” Colman says, and meeting these challenges would have taken longer than investors have patience for.

There is much whistling past the graveyard in the story, as well. For example, a spokesman for Geron Corporation claims that the company expects to begin human trials for spinal cord injury in 2008. The only thing is, it said the same thing for the years 2005, 2006, and 2007. Time will tell.