Stem Cells: Geron Dumps Stem Cell Research

Geron have announced that they will drop development of stem cells for the treatment of spinal cord injury. Why is this important for MS? Well, Geron are a US biotechnology company that have been pioneering the use of stem cells for repair of nerve tissue. Success in spinal cord injury would be of immense importance to studies in MS.






They state that financial problems (income generation) are the reasons for moving the focus away from stem cells. This is a blow to anyone that believes in this approach as progress in this area may be slowed. They have stoppped further development of clinical trials. Geron have treated a few people and have not encountered any safety issues yet, but had also not seen any benefit yet either. They are now looking to offload this part of the business and one wonders if the EU decision to restrict commercial exploitation of stem cells reported a few weeks ago influenced this decision.


However, using stem cells to regrow nerves is the hardest ask. First they have to get into the nervous tissue then they have to become nerves and then they have to re-grow the correct connections. This is going to be difficult because the default of human central nervous system is not to regrow nerves, so any stem cell has to got to go into an environment designed to prevent nerve regrowth. Then importantly it will have to regrow perhaps very long distances, which takes us years from birth to adulthood to do. So in a repair situation it may take years to grow from the spine to the feet. So the clinical trials would need to be immensly long to show positive benefit. Then the connections of the nerves have to become hooked up so that they work properly and do not cause problems of incorrect stimulation that could lead to pain or other phantom symptoms.


It will be much easier ask to try and replace myelin forming cells, which we think would help prevent nerves from dying and the nerve processes do regrow and connect to nerves to get functional recovery (Synaptic plasticity reported previously in the blog). One way is to transplant cells and hope that they become oligodendrocyte or engineer them to become oilgodendrocytes that may myelin, another way is to make cells surviving in or around the MS lesions to start myelination.


These studies are in their infancy but things are moving in the right direction.

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