| 1 | UC San Francisco (UCSF) | Stem Cells for Regenerative Medicine | 38810 | 211 | 8 | 52.8 | neutral | 3:29 | When many people think of cell therapy, so therapy from stem cells, people think about cells which are going to be directly from them turned into safe, for instance, their heart cells or, for instance, their retinal cells or something like that. And that is, in fact, how some of the first trials are going to be done. But, in fact, that's not the kind of cell therapy which is most likely going to happen for large groups of people. It's much more likely, in fact, that people will be able to get cell therapies from stem cells that are essentially off the shelf. So we have banks of cells which have been carefully selected so that there's quality control so that they, for instance, don't have any genes that would cause tumors. And also that they have been selected because they have immune characteristics that make them more likely to be accepted by somebody. It would be very inefficient, for instance, to make 20 or 30,000 embryonic stem cells for which you don't know what the genetic background is or be almost impossible to make IPS cells from all of those people. But because the people are pre-essentially pre-made, they're carrying this condition. They're universe donors. They don't really know it even. And they've given blood or they've given samples to some sort of genetic bank. And then they can be rapidly identified and then contacted and maybe just give a little bit of blood and use that blood to make now IPS cells that can now grow retinal cells, heart cells, brain cells, cells that could be used and these cell banks could be used over and over and over again. Human genetic diversity does play a role in this. So Japan and Shinnyamunaka in his lab in Japan has actually moved forward very quickly on this. And Japan is actually very well suited essentially to pioneer this new technology of these universal donor cell banks because Japan is actually a relatively homogeneous population. It's essentially one island with a hundred or a set of islands with a hundred million people that are relatively homogeneous with respect to their genetic background. And so it's actually estimated that they'll be able to make one bank that could potentially cover 80 or 90 percent of the Japanese population. It's going to be a bigger challenge of course for the rest of the world and for the United States in particular because we're much more genetically diverse. However, if we can learn from what they've learned in Japan and we can do it say for instance more efficiently, there's no reason that we can't have a cell bank that covers a large majority, perhaps 90 percent of our population. It's going to be much more difficult than what they're doing in Japan. | ↗ |