The global consulting firm Frost and Sullivan held a webinar yesterday in which they noted health care systems everywhere are facing an increasing challenge of costly chronic care. They suggested health care providers have started to embrace regenerative medicine as a viable alternative.
Because of its power to change the course of disease, the consultants called regenerative medicine, and stem cell therapies in particular, a new paradigm in human health.
“Regenerative Medicine initiatives are now attracting new public and private funding,” said the firm’s Jane Andrews in a widely picked up press release, including this post at CNBC. “Although Stem Cell Therapy will continue to be the largest market segment of Regenerative Medicine, cross segment therapies that combine the use of immunology, genetic and stem cell therapy are rapidly advancing,”
CIRM funds projects in all these technologies so it is always nice to see others joining the fight. We recently posted a series of stories about our portfolio of clinical trials that combine cell therapy and gene therapy.
The report predicts the global stem cell therapy market will reach $40 billion in five years by 2020. It also suggests that just the US market will reach $180 billion by 2030.
The firm does raise a cautionary note about the inadequacy of funding for early stage clinical work with these therapies. Our President and CEO Randall Mills has also raised an alarm about this issue and called on industry to increase its support for this work.
Organized by the Asia-Pacific branch of Frost and Sullivan the webinar breaks out the markets for Japan, Korea and Singapore. The webinar itself is available on line.
The Stem Cellar 
the contemplation of this shows you it’s never been about safety, it’s always been about the money…..and if you don’t have the money???
Should patients pay their way into clinical trials?
In a time of shrinking federal research budgets, here’s one idea for a solution: charge patients to participate in clinical trials.
Patients’ payment could fund studies that would not otherwise be conducted, said a group of medical ethicists led by Ezekiel J. Emanuel, MD, PhD, the former White House health-policy adviser who now chairs the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. Emanuel was asked by a group of academic investigators to review the legality and ethics of charging for enrollment in an early-phase clinical trial; he and his co-authors examine the pros and cons.
No laws or regulations prohibit pay-to-play, said the authors, and it has some upsides. By putting their money where their mouth is, patients could be demonstrating deep engagement with the research protocol, and affirming their informed consent. Their payment could be seen as a direct, Kickstarter-style version of a charitable contribution to medical research, or as an analogue to permissible payment for experimental treatments outside the confines of a clinical trial. Last but not least, there is a liberty argument, that “people should have the freedom to do whatever they want with their own money as long as they are not harming others or diminishing their rights and opportunities,” said the authors, whose perspective essay (subscription required) appears today in Science Translational Medicine.
– See more at: http://scopeblog.stanford.edu/2015/07/29/should-patients-pay-their-way-into-clinical-trials/#sthash.QlTjAwmV.dpuf
The number of venture capital firms investing in stem cell research has risen and government funding agencies have begun to acknowledge the future benefits of the stem cell industry. While the stiff regulations that previously guarded stem cell research have begun to relax, other legal and ethical issues continue to hamper research.