“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident”
—Arthur Schopenhauer
In the early 20th century, Russian scientist Alexander Maximow proposed a groundbreaking scientific theory.
For decades, this theory would be laughed at by the medical community. For years, it would be aggressively opposed by politicians and religious activists, sometimes even in violent protests.
Today, the same theory is building fortunes…
In 1908, Maximow became the first to coin the term “stem cell,” theorizing that all blood cells came from a common parent cell found in bone marrow. In 1924, he discovered those very cells…
But his success was short-lived.
Maximow died just four years later — before any other scientists were willing to accept his findings as truth. Like Pythagoras’s claim that the Earth is round or Galileo’s finding that the Sun is the center of the solar system, it would take years before others were willing to fully embrace this knowledge.
A Short-Lived Dogma
It wasn’t until 1963 that a man by the name of James Edgar Till was able to validate Maximow’s work by identifying self-regenerating bone marrow cells in animal models. Following this research, a slew of stem cell studies hit the academic scene, sparking the beginning of the end of stem cell ridicule.
But just like Maximow’s 1924 discovery, Till’s victory was short-lived. A wave of aggressive opposition, the height of which hit in the early 2000s, would obscure the benefits of stem cell research for decades to come.
A gross misunderstanding of stem cells allowed politicians and religious activists to misdirect the public for their own personal gain. This 2005 cartoon from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette sums up the history quite nicely:
As you’re likely already aware, the opposition to stem cell research has since drastically faded. Bush-era restrictions were lifted in 2009, and just last month, the European Commission rejected pleas to block stem cell research funding.
Today, we’re at Schopenhauer’s third stage of truth: where the benefits of stem cell treatments are becoming self-evident. Research claims are no longer ridiculed by academics, and political quarrels have been reduced to a whimper.
This is what happens when study after study continues to show the benefits of any new science.
The Regenerative Generation
Late last month, dentist and researcher Praveen Arany of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) released yet another study showing the futuristic applications of stem cell therapy.
Arany and his team drilled holes into the teeth of rats, only to regrow parts of the tooth through stem cell activation. Unlike most stem cell therapies that require doctors to harvest cells beforehand, these researchers were able to activate cells already present in rats’ teeth using energy from a laser.
The study took place at Harvard’s Wyss Institute and raises the possibility that conventional dental procedures may completely be avoided in the future. Specifically, root canals and standard fillings may become a thing of the past thanks to this advance in regenerative medicine.
Of course, teeth are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to stem cell applications.
In February, for example, Mitsutoshi Yamada of the New York Stem Cell Foundation successfully turned cells from a woman with type 1 diabetes into insulin-producing cells normally lost to the disease.
The findings are a major breakthrough because current methods of cell transplantation usually result in rejection from the immune system. But when stem cells from a patient’s own body are used, the immune system is far less likely to attack the intruding cells.
Further, just last week, researchers from Johns Hopkins University announced they have successfully grown a human retina — perhaps the single most complicated biological structure — using a type of stem cell taken from nothing more than a piece of skin.
Advancements like these are near-miracles for those suffering from age-related disease. As we get older, our regenerative capabilities slow, but stem cells have the potential to completely reverse many aging processes we previously thought were inevitable.
Hearing loss and macular degeneration (age-related blindness), for instance, are two areas that receive a heavy amount of focus from the stem cell community. Scientists have recently restored hearing to deaf rodents using stem cells, and several human clinical studies are currently underway for the treatment of vision loss.
For every release of positive data and every step into the next clinical stage, the companies running these kinds of studies experience a new rally in share price.
Just take Osiris Therapeutics’ (NASDAQ: OSIR) Prochymal, for example — a treatment for an obscure condition known as graft-versus-host disease.
Sparked by marketing approval in Canadian and New Zealand markets, this stem cell treatment rallied nearly 400% within less than two years.
With movement like that on international approvals, you can only imagine how the market would react to a positive PDUFA decision from the FDA. Likewise, we can expect an even bigger rally from stem cell therapies targeting less obscure markets.
Turning progress to profits,
Jason Stutman
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