(PS to Dave at end) COORDINATOR: And your next question is from the line of Steve Brozak of WBB Securities.
Q Good morning, gentlemen. Two quick questions and, and one of them revolves around the IP that was, that you just announced just granted. Can you just talk about a hypothetical in terms of what kind of commercial activities might be contemplated on pancreatic islet cells, A; and B) just want to go back over the liver cell potential that you, that you're looking at ‘cause I'm, I want to – these are obviously two very important areas and I'd like you to just be able to give us as much color as possible and I know that there are some restrictions.
DR. OKARMA: Sure, Steve. Well on the islet side there are two main opportunities. One is to mimic more or less the work done by the Edmonton Protocol which takes cadaveric islets from 3 to 5 cadavers, processes them and then injects them into the hepatic vein – the vein that goes to the liver – where the cells take up medium term residence, meaning a year or two. This works for a number of patients, particularly the most severe insulin-requiring Type 1 diabetics, many of whom are insulin-free for a year or two. The difficulty of course with the current version of Edmonton is the scarcity of material. As you can imagine, pancreata are very volatile and difficult to harvest and extract pancreas–or islet cells from because of all the enzymes in that tissue. So it's fraught with a lot of production problems. So one obvious way to commercialize our islets would be to piggyback on top of that general procedure, at least for the near term, to document utility of the cells in that context. Another possibility would be to put these cells into some sort of implantable device and we're looking at a number of possibilities on that front as well, but the most, most generally accepted mode of delivering these cells is into the hepatic artery. We would hope to be able to use much--many fewer cells than are currently used today because of our ability to synthesize them, to manufacture them without having to extract them from tissue from cadavers. That should translate into a much more efficient cell population and would hopefully reduce the amount of side effects that occur with the current Edmonton Protocol due to the large number of cells that have to be injected.
Now on the liver cell side, the obvious near term potential commercialization is to use these liver cells for ADME and tox screening and we've been working for some time now on developing the cells for those applications. They can be genetically engineered so that reporter genes can be engineered permanently into them which make for convenient medium to high throughput format. We are also beginning now to look at the liver cells' utility as a potential therapeutic in animal models of drug induced and toxic induced liver failure. All the work on the liver cells is being conducted by our wholly owned subsidiary in the UK, Geron Bio-Med.
Q Great. Thanks for those answers, Tom.
DR. OKARMA: You're welcome.
COORDINATOR: And there are no further questions at this time. I would like to turn the call over to Tom Okarma for closing remarks.
DR. OKARMA: Thank you very much. We appreciate the questions and your dialing in. We like this discipline and will continue doing it and we'll be chatting at the end of the third quarter. Thanks very much. Good day.
COORDINATOR: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your participation in today's conference. This concludes the presentation and you may now disconnect. Have a wonderful day.
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P.S. Dave: Neither Reply nor your link would allow me access. I sent an e-mail to you at the TOS violation address listed ;-). Also trying to post about it over at IHUB. This is my last post here today. sigh |
