One more. I love the part about being 2nd to Geron getting the IND to the FDA. "Sometimes it's the 2nd mouse that gets the cheese".
And he says the transplanted retinal cells helped 100% of the animals' vision without side effects. Pretty good percent efficacy...
BioWorld: What sort of advantage does your technology offer?
Lanza: In addition to generating "universal" blood, there are also advantages of using retinal cells to treat blindness and eye disease. We have been able to consistently and reliably generate retinal cells - known as "retinal pigment epithelium" (or RPE) - from every hESC line we have studied. These cells have been extensively characterized and have all the markers and behavior of normal retinal cells. The retinal pigment epithelium is an important eye tissue, which plays a critical role in the pathogenesis of macular degeneration, retinitis pigmentosa and other retinal degenerative diseases. In the RCS rat, improvement in visual performance was 100 percent over untreated controls without any apparent adverse effects. In untreated animals, the layer of cells the animals see with was only one layer deep after 100 days. However, in the treated animals, the cells were five-to-seven cells deep! Of course, control sham-treated eyes showed no improvement.
