STEM CELL STOCKS

[dlry]

Innovation will solve our problems..



Human Embryonic Stem Cells Approved by FDA for Clinical Trials. May Improve Lives, Solve Deficit--Yet, Totally Ignored by the Media.

But, the positive effects on our long-term, structural debt problems can be sketched. Healthcare costs in our aging population are the largest part of our potential debt, and diabetes and its complications alone account for ~20% of that cost. For most uses, hESC will likely be out-patient therapy.

To provide a context for how far we have come politically, note that the Republican Congress in the early part of this decade, not once but twice, passed a law outlawing all hESC research, and providing for the arrest at the border of any returning US citizen who had gone abroad for hESC treatment.

Imagine police being empowered to stop you, demanding not only your papers, but also your DNA--all brought to you by your friendly "small-government" people.

If Democrats cannot find the backbone to go after Republicans on their transparent hypocrisy (Karl Rove, lying as usual about the numbers, criticizing Harry Reid for not bringing "enough" stimulus money to Nevada), perhaps a good backbone transplant, using hESCs, might help them keep them from darkening our lives again.

Hopefully, some patients who would otherwise never walk again, will now walk. And, hopefully, they will walk in the inexorable march of history, forward and not backwards.

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What do you think the real reason this research has been held up? Ethical concerns? Please...

Drugmakers losing sleep over Geron's stem-cell test

You've seen those TV commercials where someone lying awake in bed stares wide-eyed at the ceiling as if sleep will never come. Then, a patient spouse rises and pushes a pill from the gods of slumber. The blurb ends with a deep-sleeping signoff.

Some folks in the pharmaceutical industry began wrestling with their own insomnia last week, but a simple pill won't cure their newfound anxiety. Sleep becomes elusive when game-changing possibilities challenge your hugely profitable business.

Last Friday, Menlo Park-based Geron said that federal regulators will let it proceed with the world's first human test of a treatment made from embryonic stem cells. Success in this preliminary safety trial could bring a type of health care reform that sounds like science fiction: drugless cures and treatments.

Beyond the effects of injury and disease, patients also suffer from secondary conditions for which pharmaceutical companies market thousands of drugs.

If you like math, multiply that savings by the number of diseases that embryonic stem cell treatments might be able to cure. You can start to see how profound this change to health care economics would be.

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Athersys repeats good heart attack study results; reports 2Q loss

And a week ago, his company reported encouraging results from a small Phase 1 trial to determine the safety and maximum dose of MultiStem for heart attack patients. MultiStem is an off-the-shelf stem cell treatment derived from the bone marrow of adults.

Three escalating doses of the therapy (20 million, 50 million and 100 million cells) were well-tolerated by patients. And patients with more severe heart attacks demonstrated better than 25 percent improvement in heart function (measured as ventricular ejection fraction) when given medium and high doses of MultiStem.

That high level of improvement is rarely seen short of radical surgery.

“An absolute improvement of 10 percent in left ventricular ejection fraction in patients who are having a myocardial infarction is a very significant benefit,” said Dr. Marc Penn, co-principal investigator on the trial, and director of Cardiovascular Cell Therapy at the Cleveland Clinic, as well as the Clinic’s Skirball Laboratory for Cardiovascular Cellular Therapeutics, during last week’s conference call.

“It’s a greater benefit than any medication short of opening the artery that we currently use,” cardiologist Penn said a week ago.

Last week, analysts called the results “good” and “surprising.” One even called it a potential “paradigm shift in the treatment of heart attacks.”

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