What experts are telling me about the march of pluripotent stem cell therapies.

Yes, it takes years to translate brilliant science into therapies, and the routes to translation aren’t predictable. Case in point, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, launched via state referendum 15 years ago among the excitement about pluripotent embryonic stem cells. The Institute has sponsored 56 clinical trials. By a quick count, only five of these trials are looking at pluripotent stem cells, the remainder testing adult stem cells for regeneration or cancer treatments.

The waters are muddied by hundreds of for-profit “stem cell clinics” that offer treatments with little or no clinical evidence. “There is no scientific basis for what these people are doing,” one prominent researcher told me. “It’s very important to draw a distinction between the malpractice and quackery of these unsubstantiated stem cell clinics and the incredibly high-tech serious science that is using all of the new targeted approaches to improve patient outcomes for really terrible diseases.”

Therapies based on induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) are entering early studies. The first iPSC clinical trial for Parkinson’s disease launched last year in Japan, for example. jCyte kicked off a successful first trial to treat a degenerative eye condition in 2017 and should post early results of a follow-up study soon. Studies for cardiac condition are likely to launch in 2020, one based on research shown successful in macaques. Also next year, Sigilon Therapeutics expects to kick off a study for hemophilia A, and Semma Therapeutics is planning trials for insulin-producing pancreatic beta cells for type 1 diabetes. “I’m happy to tell you that Semma has solved the production problem for beta cells,” co-founder Douglas Melton told me.

Labs are gearing up for off-the-shelf cell therapies, by engineering “universal donor cells” that dodge immune reaction and/or retraining T cells and other bodyguards of the immune system. This is a very long road with many complexities and safety concerns. But progress is being made, with one example this year from Melton and colleagues.

Other researchers seek to apply what we’re learning about cell plasticity to form  desired cells directly within the body. Kristen Johnson of Scripps Research’s Calibr institute, for instance, leads a trial of a small molecule designed to make healthy new knee cells. At an earlier stage, diabetes researchers aim to develop insulin-producing cells by altering pancreatic alpha cells or a recently found population of pancreatic progenitor cells. Startups OxStem and Sana Biotechnology have wildly ambitious programs in this space.

We’ll see what actually translates but the scientists I talk with believe that stem cell research will change medicine dramatically and it won’t take 15 more  years.

Images courtesy Harvard Stem Cell Institute. On left, mouse induced muscle progenitor cells at various stages of differentiation, from Konrad Hochedlinger’s lab. Top right, human green kidney cells and red blood vessels, from work led by Jennifer Lewis and Ryuji Morizane. Bottom right, from the Melton lab, two clusters of human insulin-producing cells (pink), the cluster on the right demonstrating enrichment of these cells.