Armed with a federal grant, StemCells Inc. of Palo Alto hopes to revolutionize the treatment of severe spinal cord injuries with its stem-cell technology.
The 8-year-old company recently received a $342,000 Small Business Innovation Research grant from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke to continue animal experiments using its patented human neural stem-cell technology.
StemCells is developing a cell-based therapy made from human neural stem cells, which promises to repair or repopulate neural tissue that has been damaged or lost as the result of disease or injury. For example, a neural stem cell could repair a person's damaged central nervous system.
The company (Nasdaq: STEM) harvests stem cells from donated tissue from aborted fetuses, obtained through a nonprofit California organization that the company declined to name. The company's approach has helped it discover rare stem cells, which are preprogrammed to become the mature cells of the organ from which they are derived, unlike embryonic stem cells, says president and CEO Martin McGlynn. Embryonic stem cells are the "starter set" that later differentiate into all the different kinds of cells needed to grow a body. If cells are harvested at the embryonic stage, they are not preprogrammed to form any particular organ.
And, unlike some embryonic stem-cell research, research that uses fetal stem cells is eligible to receive grants from the federal government, says Michael Werner, vice president of bioethics for the Biotechnology Industry Organization, based in Washington, D.C. Research using embryonic stem cells can only receive federal funding if the stems cells were derived from embryos prior to Aug. 9, 2001, the day President Bush outlined the federal research funding policy, Werner explains.
Earlier this year, StemCells announced that mice inflicted with spinal-cord injuries showed improved motor function after the company transplanted its neural stem-cells into the animals. The company plans to use its federal grant to expand the experiment to a greater number of mice and use more refined transplantation techniques, McGlynn says.
"This is the first time, to our knowledge, that transplanted and engrafted human neural stem cells have been directly correlated with improved function recovery in a mouse spinal-cord injury model," McGlynn says. "Previously