Funding crunch forces stem cell company to abandon therapies

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...