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StemCells, Inc. (ticker: STEM, exchange: NASDAQ) News Release - 20-Dec-2000
StemCells, Inc. Announces Board Changes, Publication on Self-Renewal and Transplantation of Neural Stem Cells
SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- (BW Healthwire) -- Dec. 20, 2000 -- StemCells,
Inc., (Nasdaq: STEM) announced today that Roger M. Perlmutter, M.D.,
Ph.D., will join its board of directors and that Donald Kennedy,
Ph.D., has resigned from the board of directors.
Dr. Perlmutter is Executive Vice President, Worldwide Basic
Research and Preclinical Development, of Merck Research Laboratories
in Rahway, New Jersey. Prior to joining Merck in February, 1997, Dr.
Perlmutter was Chairman of the Department of Immunology and Professor
of Immunology, Biochemistry and Medicine at the University of
Washington and an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Dr. Kennedy, who is the Bing Professor of Environmental Science,
Professor of Education, and President Emeritus of Stanford University,
recently became Editor-in-Chief of Science magazine.
"I have enjoyed my service on the board of StemCells, and
submitted my resignation with regret. While I hold the office of
editor-in-chief of Science, however, my responsibilities make it
appropriate for me to step down from the boards of companies engaged
in the kind of science we cover," Dr. Kennedy said. Dr. Kennedy has
also resigned from the board of Axys Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
John Schwartz, Chairman of the Board of Directors of StemCells,
said, "Don has been an enormous contributor to StemCells and we are
going to miss him sorely, but at the same time we recognize the
critical importance of his leadership of one of the most prominent
outlets of scientific communication. We are delighted that Dr.
Perlmutter is joining the StemCells board. His background, experience,
and extraordinary accomplishments as a scientist and senior executive
will be invaluable to the company."
StemCells also announced that its work on the identification and
isolation of the human neural stem cell was published in the December
19th issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA.
Dr. Nobuko Uchida, Director of Neural Stem Cell Research at StemCells
and first author of the paper, explained the significance of the
paper: "This article describes a way of reliably, reproducibly
selecting single cells from fresh tissue that self-renew, so that each
cell can generate many self-renewing daughter cells that continuously
expand in cultures. The paper also shows that after transplantation
into mice, the isolated and expanded normal human neural stem cells
continue to divide and produce mature neural cells. Moreover, no
tumors have been detected in any of the transplanted mice, even when
examined more than one year post transplant. The engraftment,
migration and differentiation to mature neural cell types is very
robust with these cells," said Dr. Uchida. "These features could make
them good candidates for cell based therapies."
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