The firm closed when investors concluded that "the likelihood of having products in the clinic in the short term was vanishingly small," Alan Colman, former chief executive of ES Cell International, told Science magazine.A story from a secular source adds specifics:
Not a problem for ethical sources, though.According to Science, ESI was attempting to turn embryonic stem cells into insulin producing cells to treat diabetes and cardiac muscle cells to counter congestive heart failure. But making well-functioning, insulin-producing cells "proved really difficult", Professor Colman said, as both therapies would have needed at least a billion cells for each dose and producing them at such numbers was prohibitively expensive.
Australia's leading adult stem cell scientist, Professor Alan Mackay-Sim, director of the National Centre for Adult Stem Cell Research at Griffith University, said he was not surprised."If you go to stem cell meetings people are saying that scaling up to the required number is a real problem with embryonic stem cells as are the problems of immune rejection and tumour formation," he said.
Professor Mackay-Sim's team can produce 20 million adult stem cells in four weeks using olfactory stem cells taken from the adult nose.I note also that Dr. Colman, one of the Dolly cloners and the former ExecDirec of ES Cell, is himself branching out beyond embryonic stem cell research.
