Stem cell therapies: can anything stop them now?

With a global society of researchers, regulators and clinicians celebrating its 25th anniversary, 2017 is a good time to consider how cellular therapies have progressed in this period, where they are now, and the obstacles preventing their advance in the next quarter-century.

There were plenty of milestones and achievements to look back on as the International Society for Cellular Therapy (ISCT) marked its 25th anniversary at its 2017 Annual Meeting in the UK this month.

The society was set up in 1992, a time before the first embryonic stem cell line was derived from a primate, when Dolly the sheep, the first artificial animal clone, was not known, and prior to Genzyme receiving the first approval for an autologous stem cell product, Carticel (autologous cultured chondrocytes), used to repair certain types of knee cartilage damage. It was also before the isolation of human embryonic stem cells by US researcher James Thomson. And all that was just in the 1990s.