Good morning! I promised myself I would be productive today. Bedding stripped and in the washer, dishes in the dishwasher, a good pancake breakfast in my tummy, now if this webinar would load I might be able to DO something!
Speaking of pancakes, I was taught to flip the pancake when the bubbles are coming up in the middle. Visual cue. I burnt a couple today because I did not catch the little bubbles.
Short of singeing my nose on the griddle, how do I know when my pancake is ready to turn? Any low vision cooking suggestions? Inquiring minds want to know.
Moving right along, I happened upon a 2015 article in Drug Discovery and Development (DD&D) magazine. The article is a bit dated which actually goes to prove the point: research is advancing incredibly fast. Besides remarking that a Nobel laureate, Sir John Gurdon, called RPE replacement one of the most successful stem cell treatments in existence at that time, the article also talked about how regulatory agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration in the States and the Medicine and Health Care Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) in the UK needed to get up to speed in the area of stem cells.
The article tells a cautionary tale about how the company Geron tried to get the first ES-cell clinical trial approved back in 1998. Their request and justification document ended up being 22,500 pages long and the approval came in – ready for this? – 2009! Good grief. The point is not that the FDA is an obstructionist organization. The point is stem cell science was an ostrich and they were used to dealing with elephants. Nothing fit their paradigms and they had no knowledge about it all.
Pete Coffey of the London Project to Cure Blindness told his own, mini horror story. He had two regulatory agencies to deal with. His wait was one year. Once again his ‘ostrich’ did not fit a system set up to deal with elephants. But kudos to the MHRA. They were not so hidebound that they could not adapt and modify.
The recent, controversial study published by Coffey, et al., was also discussed a bit in the DD&D article. After battling with the regulatory agencies and having his sponsor bail because of no fault of his own, Coffey expressed optimism that, essentially, the worst was over and his research would be moving on. In fact, there are rumors coming out of the UK that they may already be preparing for the next leg of this research. (Remember Lin has spies and secret agents everywhere.)
The article goes on to compare some of the different paths that stem cell treatment of AMD is following. Coffey used stem cells in people with wet AMD early in their disease progression. Work in the States is using stem cells in patients with geographic atrophy. In other words here we are treating after major damage has been done. Coffey and several others have started to be critical of the approach being taken in the US. Are we not at a point now we can pretty much trust the stem cell treatment? Must we wait until so late in disease progression? [Lin/Linda: click here for an article that talks about both the UK stem cell and the US stem cell trials results.]
The other comparison Coffey made was between simple injection of stem cells into the appropriate place and the use of a membrane to give structure to the cells. Coffey supports the latter approach….but that is the topic of an article Lin just sent me. Later!
Written April 7th, 2018