So that's disappointing...

Geron, the first company to have an embryonic stem cell clinical trial approved by the FDA, is closing the trial in order to focus its efforts (and $$$) on cancer therapies. Hmmm...so that's a bummer. Obviously, more people suffer from cancer than from SCI so the market to recoup R&D dollars is bigger, but for such a high profile, famous trial to pull the plug is disheartening and can't be good PR for the Cure SCI movement.

Silver lining? There are plenty of other therapies progressing everyday, now research monies and charitable gifts won't continue going to a therapy that doesn't work, etc., but this still hurts.


To cheer you up:

Working 2 Walk 2011

Here are a few great blog posts from the 2011 Working 2 Walk conference, held in Rockville Maryland October 16-18.

The first is a breakdown of many of the speakers, with a refreshing amount of the author's opinions thrown in. There were several promising presenters at the conference, therapies which offer promise moving forward, but also several disappointments, organizations that are either hung up by the FDA bureaucracy or spinning their wheels wasting time and money on therapies unlikely to succeed.

One company, InVivo, shows promise, with a therapy that creates a sort of scaffold to bridge the damage in the spinal cord and fill in the gaps with stem cells. I admire the founder's tenacity, which you can watch below, and it's obvious it will take people like this to get this thing cured once and for all.



The second post is a blow by blow breakdown, kind of haphazardly posted but available, on the Care Cure blog. Ironically, Dr. Wise Young, a hero of the SCI community and founder of the CC site, comes in for some criticism in the first link I posted for his trials currently occurring in China. Basically, there's no evidence that what he's doing in China, umbilical cord stem cells combined with lithium pills, is working. So that's disappointing.

So for the 'cure warriors', as that first link calls us, the news is both good and bad. Progress is occurring, albeit it plodding, due to both structural and scientific problems. There is a lot of hope, smart people, funding, prayer - all you should need, which means this is just a matter of time... but when that time is, no one knows. For now...I dunno, buy stock in InVivo and hope the FDA quits dragging their feet long enough to get some of these trials moving. (And here, not overseas, where all the good researchers are headed to escape the hyper-strict policies in the U.S.)