International Stem Cell Corporation Offers a Possible Alternative to Animal Corneal Testing

Please take a moment to listen to International Stem Cell Corporation Chairman, Ken Aldrich, as he discusses the benefits of using human corneas developed in Petri dishes as an alternative to testing on the eyes of innocent rabbits.  This is Ken Aldrich and I am chairman of International Stem Cell Corporation and I am here to talk to you a little bit about rabbits.  One of the things that most people don’t know is that cosmetic companies, drug companies and pesticide makers all have to test their products to see whether they do damage to the human eye.  Unfortunately, the way they do it is to take poor innocent rabbits and place them in what for all  the world looks like stocks from medieval Europe or something and pour into their eyes the chemicals that they want to test whether it is a cosmetic or a pesticide or some sort of a drug to find out what damage it does to the rabbit’s eyes from that they hope to determine whether it is safe for humans Well, we at International Stem Cell Corporation are not terribly pleased with that process and we think we have a solution.  We have developed in the Petri dish a human cornea that has all of the requisite layers of the human corneal tissue that would be necessary for such a test and we are right now determining whether or not that tissue has the same permeability as the normal human eye.  If we are right, what we hope to be able to do is to provide these kinds of human eyes in a Petri dish to drug companies so that they can test all of the chemicals and all of the pesticides and all of the cosmetics that they want without ever harming a rabbit and get better results and do it at a fraction of the cost.  It’s just one of our ways of trying to make the planet a little better.