Dr. Wise how significant is Neuralstem Inc. hNSC study

[Agios]

Dr. Young...How significant is the recent news regarding the use of human fetal neural stem cells from Johns Hopkins and Neuralstem Inc?

Thanks for everything that you are doing....

Peace, Love and Energy,

Agios

PS Sorry about the misprint ...although you are very "Wise"!

[Wise Young]

Originally Posted by Agios

Dr. Young...How significant is the recent news regarding the use of human fetal neural stem cells from Johns Hopkins and Neuralstem Inc?

Thanks for everything that you are doing....

Peace, Love and Energy,

Agios

PS Sorry about the misprint ...although you are very "Wise"!

Agios,

About all the I know about Neuralstem comes from the press (Source) and the company's website. Most of the stories appear to be related to the patent struggle between Stem Cells Inc and Neuralstem Inc. and I have not seen the published studies from the company itself. They hold three US patents for deriving and growing stem cells. Although an initial ruling from the Patent Office was in favor of Neuralstem, I don't think that the lawsuits are over.

Neuralstem was founded in 1996 by Dr. Karl Johe (Source) and was been active in the news circuit (Source) and was forced to cut back its staff by 70% in 2002 (Source). They obtained significant funding (about $20 million) this past February (Source). They have been collaborating with the University of California at San Diego to study ischemic spastic paraplegia... i.e. ischemic injury of the spinal cord.

Here are some recent abstracts from the company founder at a scientific meeting (Source):

The Use of a Stable Human Neural Stem Cell Line in In-Vitro Assays for Drug Discovery
Karl Johe, PhD, Chairman & Chief Scientific Officer, NeuralStem Inc.

Neural stem cells are multipotential progenitors of the developing CNS, which differentiate into all three major cell types of the mature CNS--neurons, astrocytes, and oligodendrocytes. The types of neurons arising from individual neural stem cell depend upon the temporal and spatial cues present in the cell at the time of isolation. Such developmental information is maintained stably throughout long-term passage in culture. Neuralstem, Inc. has established a collection of human neural stem cell lines from various areas of developing human CNS. These cell provide a renewable source of physiological human neurons and glia. Gene expression profiling and functional assays demonstrate that these cells contain numerous potential targets, including various voltage-gated ion channels and ligand-gated ion channels in many different subtype compositions and are therefore useful for drug screening aimed at psychiatric diseases. For drug screening aimed at neurodegenerative diseases, several assays suitable as primary or secondary assays have been established. One internal drug screening project will be discussed as an example, which aims to discover orally active neurogenic drug that stimulates birth of new functionally active neurons from endogenous neural stem cells in injured adult brain.

Biography: Dr. Johe co-founded Neuralstem in 1996 and has been serving at the Company as the chief scientific officer. As a recognized expert in neural stem cell field, Dr. Johe is the sole inventor of Neuralstem's patented CNS stem cell technology. Dr. Johe was a Senior Staff Scientist in the Laboratory of Molecular Biology at the National Institute of Neurological Disease and Stroke. Dr. Johe received a B.A. in Chemistry and an M.A. in Biochemistry from the University of Kansas, and earned a Ph.D. from Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Dr. Johe completed his postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco.

Wise.

[Agios]

Thank you so much Dr. Young. As with so many things in life, it appears to be a "we shall see" situation. Nevertheless, as you and so many others have pointed out, we have so much to be optimistic about and so much to look forward to, like never before... and the science will keep getting better (in most cases)!

Agios