Dr. Sergiu Pașcă

I was doing experiments at that time, studying actually the cortex and recording from animals, electrical activity of those neurons.

And always like thought, it's like this disconnect between what I was seeing in the clinic, which were these patients with severe profound autism.

And then recordings from the brain and thinking, we're never going to be able to do that.

How are we going to understand this complex disorder of the brain if we cannot even listen to the activity of those cells live?

And then suddenly, like seeing that discovery, you know, again, naive at that time, thought, well, that could be perhaps the way in which we could make neurons from any patient.

And so very soon after I came to Stanford, which I guess where we met, with sort of like this idea in mind that we will be able to make neurons from these patients

and rebuild maybe some of the cells or some of the circuits of the brain outside of the body without doing any harm because we're not doing a biopsy of the brain or anything invasive, just essentially creating a replica of some of those cells outside of the body and then finally study them at will in a dish and do all kinds of experiments where you remove things and add things and perhaps one day even develop therapeutics.

And here we are.

16 years later, since that process really started, took a long time.

But now for the first time, we've gotten such a good understanding of some of these conditions, and one of them in particular, that actually a therapeutic is inside and we're preparing for the first clinical trial that is really arising exclusively through studies done with this human stem cell models without actually using any animal models, just essentially creating, recreating cells and circuits outside of the brain of those patients.

So those cells that are collected from the umbilical cord are stem cells, but they're already quite restricted in what they can make.

So their applications are also restricted, mostly to blood disorders.

So I think it's important to keep in mind that they're not so like a universal solution to anything that would ever involve pluripotent stem cells in the future or stem cell therapies in the future.

So again, I think it's important to know that while they have certain applications and there have been quite clear cases where the availability of those cells were useful in a blood disorder in that child later on, they're certainly not...

You know, they have these universal uses as maybe sometimes they're being advertised.

Well, that's one of the problems.

Very often we don't even know what is being injected.

I think that is like a very important aspect.

We don't know what is in.

Sometimes are the cells from the patient that are being collected.