thanks rumit,
Shaking my head here, how many times since the SMD gained FDA clearance has ACT touted the fact they don't need funding to start trial? And then 4 months later we read the following..so, is it really because of so much interest from different clinical sites or something else that we haven't started SMD yet?
"For ACT, the funding restrictions also threatened to delay a clinical trial. The company had been counting on funding from the Foundation Fighting Blindness, a non-profit organization based in Columbia, Maryland, to back its trial of a therapy for Stargardt's disease, a hereditary cause of blindness in children. But the human ES cells in the therapy were derived from a blastomere, and as the foundation draws its clinical-trial support from the federally funded National Eye Evaluation Research Network, it was barred from contributing to the costs of the trial."
"We're tearing our hair out over here," says Stephen Rose, chief research officer at the Foundation Fighting Blindness. "We really wanted to help fund this trial." Eventually, ACT pulled money from its other research programmes to fund the trial, which is scheduled to begin later this year.
