Stem cell therapies are a key component of regenerative medicine, a medical field that holds many great promises. Thanks to some pretty dramatic technological advances observed in the last years, we might be right now on the brink of a new therapeutic age in which restoring tissues or organs, or even growing new ones by activating the body's own repair mechanisms will become common practice.
However, in terms of return on investment, let's face it, with a very few exceptions, most early investors in stem cell biotechs have been losing money. Some of the earliest commercial stem cell biotechs were founded in the late 1980s and went public during the next decade, and what was once seen as a very exciting investment opportunity led to many disappointments.
Clinical trials either did not live up to expectations or suffered important delays, burning large amounts of cash with few tangible results - as a striking latest example, stem cell pioneer StemCells, Inc. (STEM) just announced the winding-down of its operations after more than three decades of research. As a consequence, investors might have decided to abandon the field entirely, losing all hope that stem cell products would actually make it to the market and generate substantial revenues.
As this article will show, while it is true that long-term returns are yet to materialize, one should not overlook the fact that developing a new technology and bringing viable product to the market takes a lot of time - in that, stem cell biotechs are not fundamentally different from any other biotech venture, as detailed in a previous article. Hence, as with many types of technological breakthroughs and especially in the healthcare field, there comes a time when technologies reach maturity and start delivering convincing clinical results, which usually translates into a big uptake
