Short Screen member MonkeyPilot, who is a research scientist in the pharmaceutical industry, offered his take on BTIM and the bio-pharma industry in general via e-mail. For the whole enchilada you can see this blog post ( http://steamcatapult.c... ), but below are the parts related to BTIM:

"BioTime (BTIM) has a large number (148 in their promotional materials, and more to come) of stem cell lines to sell. All of these are the “multipotent” stem cell lines, not the totipotent embryonic stem cells that are really the holy grail of stem cell research. It sounds like they have a plan to get to those through some kind of genetic manipulation, but they aren’t selling them yet. At any rate, selling the picks & shovels (to carry along the metaphor) is still a long way from getting the gold out of the ground- especially without a map. Sure, Levi & Strauss built a business selling jeans to miners. But the big money is still in the gold. I think a more apt metaphor might be Monsanto. A farmer buys their seed & it makes his life easier. He is the one who has to sweat over the field & harvest a crop- which is ultimately the product. And he can re-plant it (although, is legally bound not to), but he can also buy his seed from someone else or develop his own.

Although I’m sure they probably have contractual obligations in place for anyone working with their lines, the hard work of turning these lines into any kind of therapy is still in the future: figuring out HOW to make them useful, and then proving that to the FDA. I’m sure they have their own line of research into this, but the big payoff is in an actual therapeutic product. And any agency with the know-how to do that will likely be able to to generate their own stem cell lines, as well.

Not to rain on anyone’s parade (I’ll repeat my caveats: I’m no expert in this field, and my information is obviously limited), but this is still a long way from a miracle cure. And not only a long way, but who knows? Maybe stem cells, for all their potential, will turn out to be a dead end too. I can think of at least two other ideas off the top of my head that looked great on paper (gene therapy and antisense DNA technology) but haven’t gone anywhere in my lifetime. And the most promising one (siRNA) was unknown 10 years ago. All that said, maybe BioTime does have a leg up in the stem cell field. They have existing products and revenues. Maybe that will buy them the time to find a real solution.

[...]

One other thought on BioTime (what an awful name; makes me think of popcorn): attaching someone’s famous name makes no difference to me. “father of regenerative medicine”? It doesn’t matter if he’s the godfather of soul. If a company doesn’t make anything worth buying, what’s the difference? A lot of scientists with big ideas died poor. Craig Venter made himself a lot of cash on the race to the human genome, but he walked away from HGSI & his latest company (featured in the NYT business section last Sunday) is still bleeding VC & partnership money. Beside that is the fact that as I mentioned, there is no such thing as “regenerative medicine”. At least not yet. We can call him the father when the pregnancy is over. Yes, there is enormous potential. Just like nuclear fusion. I’m not holding my breath for either one."

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