Geron: A New Dawn in Stem Cells

Last August, the day after Barack Obama clinched the Democratic Presidential nomination, I sat down with Doctor Thomas Okarma in the lab of his company, Geron, to talk about the future of stem cell research. 

Dr. Okarma was optimistic, because the odds were good that either Obama or Republican John McCain would loosen the reins on human stem cell research.  Not a sure thing, of course, but a change looked promising, on something that had been chained up pretty tightly during the Bush years.

 

A couple of months went by, no new research was announced, and Geron’s (GERN) stock price fell to multi-year lows.  It seemed that the breakthrough Dr. Okarma spoke of that day might be further off than he initially thought.

 

Fast-forward to Friday morning:  In the teeth of a crumbling economy, there was Dr. Okarma on the TV talk shows, with renewed optimism about the just-announced FDA decision to allow Geron, a small company based in Menlo Park, to test embryonic stem cells on (actual) people who have spinal injuries.  His company was the talk of Wall Street (no small feat on the day after a Google earning report), and Geron’s share price had soared by as much as 56%.

 

Geron is, even more than most biotech companies, a speculative stock play at best.  There is real, exciting research being done there, but even with the Obama green light, stem cell research is still in its early stages.  Dr. Okarma himself admits that — but as I watched his on TV this morning, I thought back to that day in the lab, when he referred to stem cells as pills of the future.  As in: fewer prescription medications, if stem cell research takes off.  That’s an exciting, mind-blowing, not-quite-sure-what-it-means yet kind of thought.  Like stem cell research itself, the notion is full of potential and possibility, but we’re not there yet.

 

There will be lots of medical and ethical hurdles ahead, not to mention the process of signing people up for the trials.  But it’s -possibly- the dawn of a new medical day, led largely by Silicon Valley-based research.  Where it goes from here is not yet mapped out, but it will be exciting to follow.