Mr. Aldrich: International Stem Cell was founded back in 2001. It was really an outgrowth of an effort by my co-founders and by Elena Revazova, who has been our Chief Scientist from day one, to see if we could find a solution to the supply problems for cells to treat diabetes. We knew at that time that you could treat diabetes with human cells, but the problem was there weren't enough of them to go around and the body was rejecting them. So we thought if we could somehow use stem cells to solve that problem, we could save a lot of lives and transform a lot of other lives. That was the beginning of it. What happened along the way was that we discovered a whole new class of stem cells that have all of the positive characteristics of embryonic stem cells but do not have the negative ethical connotations because we don't have to use or destroy a fertilized human embryo. We worked solely with unfertilized eggs through a process that cannot yield a human being. So we take the whole worry about destroying embryos, about cloning human beings, and remove that from the equation. Probably more important in the long run, however, is the fact that because we are working only with the DNA from the mother and don't have the complicated addition of the sperm donor DNA, we end up with a simplified DNA model that enables us to use a single cell line to match big segments of the population. For example, our first cell line under our new technology will match the immune systems of an estimated 350 million people. You just can't do that with existing embryonic stem cell lines or frankly any other kind of stem cell that we know of. We think in the long run that's going to be the single most important factor with our technology, differentiating what we are doing from almost anyone else in the field. People misuse the term "platform technology" a lot. In this case, it really is a platform. Any scientist anywhere in the world who wants to develop a therapy based on human cells can, in theory, use our cells and match a large number of people without having to use immunosuppressant. That's the nub of what the company is about and why we are as excited as we are.
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