Funding crunch forces stem cell company to abandon therapies
By Monya Baker,
Nature Biotechnology
| 09. 03. 2007
With private investors apparently unwilling to back its efforts to bring a product to the clinic, Singapore's flagship stem cell company has ditched its cell-therapy programs in favor of other applications of stem cell technology, including licensing human embryonic stem (hES) cell lines created under clinical manufacturing standards and using hES cells to develop screening assays for drug development. The move by ES Cell International (ESI) also suggests a shift in biotech development in Singapore generally, toward lower-risk research support programs.
"Because products and profits are a long way off, the cell-therapy aspect of stem cell commercialization is a very hard sell with savvy investors," explains former CEO Alan Colman, who, along with some two-thirds of ESI's scientists, will move to new labs within 100 meters of ESI, where he will run the Singapore Stem Cell Consortium, which is being supported by the same group that funded ESI-Singapore's Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR). The new strategy, on the other hand, is "pretty much assured of medium-term revenue," he says. "We might have made a mistake in not including...
Related Articles
By Annika Inampudi, Science | 08.01.2025
In June, Sara* received a message asking whether she wanted to continue to participate in a massive, multicenter research project led by scientists at Aarhus University in Denmark. The iPsych study, the message said, had sequenced her genetic data from...
The Center for Genetics and Society is delighted to recommend the current edition of GMWatch Review – Number 589. UK-based GMWatch, a long-standing ally, was founded in 1998 by Jonathan Matthews as an independent organization seeking to counter the enormous corporate political power and propaganda of the GMO industry and its supporters. Matthews and Claire Robinson are its directors and managing editors.
CGS works to ensure that social justice, equity, human rights, and democratic governance are front...
By Harry Hunter, PET BioNews | 08.11.2025
The Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology has announced plans to publish a POSTnote and called for submissions on surrogacy law in the UK and internationally.
The current UK surrogacy laws, largely based on legislation from the 1980s, have been...
By Molly Gray, Nuffield Council on Bioethics | 08.13.2025
Human embryo at about 8 weeks
by Anatomist90, CC3.0
With debate growing around whether the “14-day rule” on human embryo research remains fit for purpose, the need for inclusive public dialogue is more important than ever. Decisions about whether...
