COORDINATOR: And your next question is from the line of Mark Gross of California State University.
Q Good morning. Thank you. Dr. Okarma, Geron has several near term opportunities for recurring revenues, including nuclear transfer, royalties from Roche's bladder cancer diagnostic and hepatocytes for drug screening. Do you see any of those as likely to generate material revenues for Geron this decade - say at the level of several million dollars per year?
DR. OKARMA: In, in this decade?
Q Yes. In this decade.
DR. OKARMA: Answer is yes.
Q Which ones do you think we should focus on?
DR. OKARMA: Well, in this decade, all of them.
Q Okay. All right. Thank you. One other question. From time to time someone comes out with claims of being able to reprogram somatic cells using growth factors but without nuclear transfer. For example, there's been an issued patent to Robert Langer's group at MIT, patent applications from Advanced Cell Technology and from Peter Schultz's group at Scripps. Have you looked into any of these claims and does Geron have any interest or concern regarding them?
DR. OKARMA: Well, we're not aware of any method that works, let alone could be scaled, and we do pay close attention to the field and have since we acquired our own nuclear transfer portfolio. But I think what's more important than whether or not someone figures out how to do reprogramming is the recognition that it's not required for stem cell based therapy and in fact would completely abrogate the low cost of goods, scalable features that embryonic stem cells have. If we were to go backward toward an individual therapy, patient by patient, his or her own stem cells, his or her own therapeutic cells, it'd be like the bone marrow transplantation industry which you're well aware has zero industrial participants in it, because the cost of goods is too high and that is a service model. Our business model is a product model where we have scalable production of cells that are aliquoted and shipped and stored frozen for real time off the shelf use and embryonic stem cells are the only stem cell platform for which that business model is possible.
Q Okay. Thank you. |
