Last week, two teams of scientists announced to great fanfare news that they had created the equivalent of embryonic stem cells from ordinary skin cells. Embryonic stem cells, for the uninitiated, have the intriguing ability to become any type of cell and therefore have the potential to morph into heart, nerve and even brain tissue.
As an added benefit, the discovery holds out the possibility that researchers will now be able to produce an unlimited supply of stem cells without any of the moral questions that have muddied the issue of embryo cloning.
The Hype
Not surprisingly, many in the stem cell field were to heap a healthy pile of hyperbole on top of the news. One publication called the breakthrough one of medicine’s holy grails; another researcher gushed, “It’s exciting, it’s seminal, it’s major—quite frankly, I think it’s potentially Nobel-level.” And still another official from Advanced Cell Technology heralded it as both the “biological equivalent of the Wright Brothers’ first airplane” and “a bit like learning how to turn lead into gold.”
These superlatives might be justified; but before rushing out and investing in any stem cell company, readers are encouraged to consider the analogy to the first airplane for a far different reason: as an industry, airlines lost more money than they made during the first 90 years of their existence. And for reasons which I’ll explain shortly, the stem cell industry’s path to profitably could also be some time in the making.
The Hope
First, though, let me elaborate on why the breakthrough does engender legitimate hope. To begin, the task of reprogramming ordinary cells into pluripotent stem cells is apparently so simply that scores of labs around the world will be able to mimic the methodology almost immediately. Secondly, because it side-steps the ethical issues of destroying embryos and/or using unfertilized human eggs to create embryos, the research will qualify for federal research funding. In turn, the combination of these two developments is expected to speed the pace of stem cell research by encouraging more researchers to go into the field.
The second great hope is that in addition to soon using these stem cells to help patients suffering from diseases such as Parkinson’s and diabetes, the tissues grown from these stem cells could also help pharmaceutical companies by getting an early read on how their drugs might work on treating various diseases. This promise has lead a number of pharmaceutical companies to show an interest in using stem cell technology to test drug toxicity during the early stages of drug development.
The Reality
As promising as all of this, however, it will be some time before any of these new stem cells lead to commercial developments. There are multiple reasons for this. For starters, in spite of the revolutionary nature of the development, the researchers admit that the process by which the skin cells turn into stem cells remains a mystery. This type of uncertainty scares regulators as well as large corporations—who are reluctant to get too heavily involved lest they be dragged into costly and time-consuming lawsuits which may result from any problems caused by this lack of complete understanding.
Furthermore, the new stem cells are similar to—but not identical—to embryonic stem cells. The distinction is an important one because transplanted stem cells must be very pure or they can otherwise lead to cancerous growths.
Related to this problem of cancer is the issue of how the skin cells are currently transformed into stem cells. It turns out that the researchers use viruses to ferry genes into the skin cells. And while this type of gene therapy gets the job done, the researchers acknowledge that they will need to find an alternative method to transform cells into stem cells because these viruses could also cause mutations and cancers.
Bottom-line
This is not to say that some or perhaps all of these obstacles won’t be overcome in time. In fact, given that more money and scientists will likely pour into the field as result of this breakthrough, these issues probably will be addressed. It is just that all of this will take some time—perhaps even up to a decade. And this means that executives in the life sciences, pharmaceutical and health care industries (as well as investors in these fields) have plenty of time to digest the consequences of this latest stem cell advance because, as significant as it is, it isn’t going to change the world overnight.
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Jack Uldrich is a writer, futurist, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business. He is also a frequent speaker on future technology and future trends, nanotechnology, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and trade associations.
