Stanford Stem Cell Product, Delayed for More than a Decade, to be Tested Again
By Lisa M. Krieger,
San Jose Mercury News
| 06. 14. 2015
STANFORD -- In the 1990s, Stanford's Irv Weissman created a unique way to grow and deliver blood stem cells to desperate patients with aggressive cancers, boosting survival rates.
But then the discovery itself died -- a victim of the heartbreaking economics of commercial stem-cell development, where the long and rocky road of research, especially in the field of "personalized medicine," often discourages investment.
Now, 10 years after the technique's sale and then abandonment by a biotech company, it is back in Weissman's hands. The goal, he said, is to finally resume his research to prove, once and for all, its effectiveness in patients with no other hope.
"I am frustrated by more than a decade of delay," said Weissman, who codirects the Stanford Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine. "But I'm delighted that medical need, rather than rapid profits, is now the primary criterion to translate our stem cell discoveries."
Weissman's discovery was a method to isolate, purify and transplant cells, called blood-forming stem cells. These are the cells deep in the marrow of our bones that generate...
Related Articles
By Abby McCloskey, The Dallas Morning News | 10.10.2025
We Texans like to do things our way — leave some hide on the fence rather than stay corralled, as goes a line in Wallace O. Chariton’s Texas dictionary This Dog’ll Hunt. Lately, I’ve been wondering what this ethos...
By Émile P. Torres, Truthdig | 10.17.2025
The Internet philosopher Eliezer Yudkowsky has been predicting the end of the world for decades. In 1996, he confidently declared that the singularity — the moment at which computers become more “intelligent” than humanity — would happen in 2021, though...
By Julia Black, MIT Technology Review | 10.16.2025
Consider, if you will, the translucent blob in the eye of a microscope: a human blastocyst, the biological specimen that emerges just five days or so after a fateful encounter between egg and sperm. This bundle of cells, about the size of...
By Carter Sherman, The Guardian | 10.16.2025