Fight Aging!

You'll find an interesting interview over at h+ magazine with one of the researchers who has been performing first generation stem cell therapies for the past eight years in China. It provides some good insights into the comparative economics of the present situation: on the one hand, regions like the US that are research powerhouses but so heavily regulated that significant progress cannot be made on applications of that research; on the other hand regions like China where research is less well established but applications and development are more advanced.

It's a strange world we have come to inhabit, at least for those of us old enough to think it remarkable that China is in any aspect a bastion of freedom in comparison to the US - insofar as medical development and clinical application is concerned, in any case.

From the article:

From 2000 to 2001, China’s stem cell research was still poorly funded. James Thomson published his breakthrough work creating embryonic stem cell lines from human blastocysts in Science Magazine in 1998, which kicked off a race for funding in the West. After seeing the first successful Chinese case treated with stem cells at Zhengzhou University Hospital in 2001, I decided to get involved with the research. I was interested in taking laboratory bench work to the hospital bedside. I think that cell-based therapy has a lot of potential because most of the biological activities in our bodies occur at the cellular level. In 2004, after three years of clinical studies observing more than 100 cases, I decided to build a company to supply and work on safe adult stem cells.

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As of February 2009, Beike has treated over 5,087 patients with cord blood stem cell injections for diseases like ataxia, autism, ALS, brain trauma, cerebral infarction, cerebral hemorrhage, cerebral palsy, diabetics, Guillain-Barre, encephalatropy, and spinal cord injury - many of these are considered incurable diseases.

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We're a China-based stem cell company. Our major challenge is the U.S. FDA standard. For the time being, the U.S. and Europe hold the majority shares of the market because the cost for treatments is still too high for developing countries. We want to build our clinics and labs there.

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The research environment in China is still behind. The communication between scholars is still very limited. However, we no longer have difficulty getting material support from overseas. Last year, we hosted China’s first ever symposium on advanced iPS (induced pluripotent stem cell) research as well as the first annual China Stem Cell Technological Forum. We hope to bring the Chinese closer to the international community.

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After all these years of observation and practice, I consider adult stem cell-based therapy to be safe. I believe it will become one of the major players in medical industry because it overcomes the single molecule limitation (manipulating single molecules at the molecular level).

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Beike did not go through the traditional path of a typical biotech company because it would have been too costly for us.

The work that has been taking place in China is closer to the way that things should get done if you'd like to see faster progress. Medicine is no different from any other field, in that the greatest benefit arises where people are free to work hard to bring new products to the marketplace, other people are free to compete for the customers with better offerings, and the customers themselves make informed choices as to where to spend their money. Anything that interferes with the simplicity of supply, demand, competition, and the care over money that comes from spending from your own purse will inevitably act as a spanner thrown into the wheel of progress.

I find it striking that after the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, virtually no effort was made to privatize health services. To be sure, there are now private health services in these countries, but the official systems of socialized medicine still exist. This fact is a testament to the reigning orthodoxy. The world seems to understand that it is a mistake to nationalize agriculture and factory production. No one advocates a Department of Software Development, even if there are far more interventions in this sector than there should be. And yet health care, all over the world, is assumed to be a normal function of government.