Stem Cell News They Don’t Think You Can Use (123006)

BizzyBlog readers can infer from the title that the news will be about adult stem cells.

The news in the past 30 days about the relevant work of Cellerant Therapeutics is outside the realm of what any casual news consumer might normally come across: a company press release that ended up being posted at three different PR news services (here, here, and here), and this article in Forbes’ December 11 issue, which I have excerpted:

Rebooting the Body
Cellerant Therapeutics aims to use purified adult stem cells to cure a host of wrenching diseases.

In a darkened laboratory off Silicon Valley’s Highway 101, a machine called a flow cytometer is sorting through 300 million white blood cells, one at a time, at a rate of up to 60,000 per second. The sorter, housed in a glass box the size of a big fish tank, is looking for blood-forming stem cells, the precursors to the body’s red and white blood cell lines. It’s a laborious process, requiring half a day to fill a chilled vial with 50 million to 150 million stem cells. But the work may be worth it. What’s inside the vial has an outside chance of being a miracle cure for a host of diseases.

The lab, run by Cellerant Therapeutics in San Carlos, California, has yet to prove anything, but its promise is great: Inject purified doses of adult blood-forming stem cells, which normally regenerate from inside bone marrow, to revive the diseased bloodstreams of sufferers of sickle-cell anemia, lupus, Crohn’s disease and Type 1 diabetes. It’s the biological equivalent of rebooting a crashed computer.

The serum’s purity is crucial: Traces of the immune system’s T cells could set off a lethal rejection by the recipient, but an absolutely pure dose of adult blood-forming stem cells can, in theory, be used in any patient without fear of rejection. Cellerant has dosed radiation-ravaged lab mice with other mice’s purified stem cells and watched them recover to full health in months. “We’ve learned enough biology to start curing diseases,” says Cellerant Chief Executive Bruce Cohen. The company has raised $25 million from seven venture capital firms including MPM Capital and Allen & Co.

A trial in humans is slated to begin in January on 15 to 20 sickle-cell anemia patients, for whom the current curative treatment is a bone marrow transplant, assuming they can find a donor. Cohen also hopes to begin a trial next year with advanced-stage breast cancer patients to boost their red and white blood cells.

….. Cellerant’s claims of better medicine through purity may crumble under closer inspection. Several previous attempts to purify bone marrow for sickle-cell transplants have failed. “Some of the cells that are removed in purification are important,” says Dr. Mark Walters, head of the Blood & Marrow Transplant Program at Children’s Hospital Oakland in Oakland, California. “Can you overcome this? That’s what they need to show.” Cellerant says it might succeed where others have failed by giving patients larger numbers of purified cells. Walters, one of the principal investigators on the trial, says it will be clear within six weeks of the transplant if the purified cells take root. “If it works, it would be a big advance,” he adds.

…. Because Cellerant is transplanting unaltered human cells–a process similar to an organ transplant–the company does not have to go through the traditional three-step clinical trials to get U.S. Food & Drug Administration approval. The FDA just has to verify that Cellerant’s purification process meets its good-tissue-practice standard. Cellerant is performing the work at a lab that already has such approval.

The possibly-imminent “big advance” in adult stem cell research (ASCR) described here has been ignored, except by Forbes, which saw an entrepreneurial angle it could use in the story (previous issues of Forbes have lamented the dearth of money being directed towards life-destroying embryonic stem cell research [ESCR]). Yet the formerly Mainstream Media coverage of what was ultimately shown to be an overhyped non-advance by Advanced Cell Technologies in ESCR several months ago was overwhelming.

ASCR is the area where real progress is being made continually, but it gets little, if any, respect. ESCR gets covered as soon as the PR people start dialing out to their media contacts.

Why?