The mission to develop therapies for non-hematopoietic indications through the use of somatic tissue derived stem and progenitor cells was conceived in 1994 by pioneers in the fields of stem cell biology and neurobiology, Drs. Irving Weissman (Stanford), Fred (Rusty) Gage (Salk Institute & UCSD), and David Anderson (Caltech). Their vision to identify and purify tissue stem cells preceeded the discovery of the human embryonic stem cell (1998) and induced pluripotent stem cells (2007). The Company’s founders developed the concept of identifying other non-hematopoietic tissue stem cells for use in regenerative medicine based upon two key areas of scientific discovery. First, the identification and purification of the mouse and human hematopoietic stem cells, which at the single cell level could self-renew, produce all blood cell lineages, and engraft long-term in vivo. The second scientific discovery was the existence of neural stem cells in rodents and man. A convergence of these ideals led to the concepts that somatic ‘adult’ stem cells, such as the human neural stem cell, could be purified, expanded in culture, and could provide the cells for treating, and possibly curing a spectrum of human diseases.
The concept of stem cells for regenerative medicine has its foundation in the pioneering works by E. Donnall Thomas (Ferrebee & Thomas, 1960) using bone marrow transplantation for hematopoietic rescue. Over the next fifty years, the co-evolution of scientific discovery with computers and fluorescence based cell sorting (Loken et al. 1988) laid the ground work for the identification, isolation, and characterization of the mouse (Spangrude et al, 1988) and human (Baum et al., 1992) hematopoietic stem cells and in 1998 the human embryonic stem cells (ESC) (Thomson et al., 1998) and more recently, reprogrammed induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) (Takahashi et al., 2009).
Retinal diseases are viewed as an optimal target for cell transplantation approaches because of ease of access, out-patient surgical procedure, the size of the eye, and the availability of non-invasive tests for visual function assessment following cell transplantation.