The Santa Monica, Ca., firm said yesterday that it has applied to the FDA to start trials aimed at reversing vision loss with retinal cells created from the stem cells.
The firm, which has labs in Massachusetts, is only the second business to seek to perform clinical trials involving hESC. Geron, another California company, was the first, but its efforts are now on hold until late next year because of FDA safety concerns.
Neither of the firms has received funding from the California stem cell agency. ACT, however, moved its headquarters to California, partly to seek funding from CIRM.
The firm's announcement received modest news coverage. Steve Connor of the Independent in Great Britain quoted Robert Lanza, ACT's chief scientific officer as saying,
"'We've seen absolutely no adverse effects whatsoever in any of the preclinical experiments and our cells are more than 99.9 per cent pure. We certainly expect them [the FDA] to come back with comments and questions but our hope is that we will start sometime early next year. We're optimistic and certainly confident in our own data. We've been in dialogue [with the FDA] and we know what was on their mind and what they wanted us to do. We're hoping, assuming no hitches, to begin early next year, perhaps March."Here are links to additional coverage: Los Angeles Times, Science, Nature, MassHighTech.
I think ACT has been trying to do this for the past couple of years. I mean it has become better that obama somewhat lifted the ban on embryonic stem cell research but still alot of other companies are hyping up the research like Geron. I remember they were in the news for hyping their research up.
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