Over at the California Stem Cell Report, David Jensen is reporting on some good news from CIRM for California on the stem cell clinical trial front.
Stem cell biotechs Asterias and Capricor have stem cell trials supported by 20+ million in CIRM funding each and have been hitting milestones. These trials are progressing and so far have good safety profiles. Asterias and CIRM have mentioned some possibly encouraging early hints at efficacy as well in its trial, and apparently there are hopeful hints from the Capricor trial too.
See the posts from CIRM here (a weekly summary kind of post that begins discussing Asterias) and here. For background, also see past posts I’ve done on both companies here and here in the archives, and see especially my interview with Asterias leadership from a few months back.
It’s early days for these trials and at these phases they are not really designed to look for efficacy so a conservative approach to discussing such trials is in order given the stage, but at this phase of the game for early clinical trials the news has been all one could hope for so far in both cases.
The Asterias and Capricor trials are for spinal cord injury and Duchenne muscular dystrophy, respectively. The latter trial utilizes the Capricor CAP-1002 product, which is a cool allogeneic cardiosphere technology made from donor human heart tissue. A beating cardiosphere from a different source (IPSCs) can be seen in the video above. Asterias’ trial employs their OPC product made from hESCs, which is also inherently allogeneic. The idea of potentially repairing the injured spine via stem cells is intriguing.
I’m hoping in the next month or so to do a broader update on the stem cell and regenerative medicine biotech arena. By way of disclosure, I do not have any financial stake in either company discussed here.