JE: How did you come to be involved first as chief scientific officer, then as director, and now as chairman at IMUC?

Dr. Yu: Well, the company that I founded with a colleague of mine — I was originally attracted toward commercializing our therapy because of some of the frustrations I felt as an academic investigator in terms of being able to develop therapies for our patients, and that was essentially a therapy did not have a strong commercial backing and a clear pathway toward commercialization. It was something that was very difficult to take past the phase one clinical trial, meaning the small clinical trial testing a few patients. If you wanted to develop a therapy that would be applicable to the population of patients out there, it had to be strategically developed with an eye toward commercialization from the start. Let me give you an example of this.

Having been somewhat non-committal regarding stem cell research in the past, big pharma’s gradual investment in stem cell based biotechnologies indicates a significant, although slow paced, shift in attitude. Many apprehensions for these investments were due to an abundance of unproven clinical trial data and the ethical implications associated with this type of research. With [...]