National Editor

Six months after letting go of research staff to focus more tightly on its lead product against cancer and its stem cell products, Geron Corp. is doing it again.

The Menlo Park, Calif.-based company is reducing its work force by 29 researchers and their support staff of 11 employees, saying the move reflects progress of the anticancer drug, GRN163, and the human embryonic stem cell (hESC) work.

"It sounds like doom and gloom and the roof's falling in, and it's anything but that," said Thomas Okarma, Geron's president and CEO.

Okarma said the company has been doing outlicensing deals and cutting back on research as development advances according to plan.

"We've done that over the past couple of years, which has allowed us to increasingly focus on the home run, which is [GRN163]," Okarma told BioWorld Today.

In June, Geron said it was saying goodbye to about 30 percent of its work force, mostly research staff, by almost the same numbers: 33 researchers and 10 support staffers. (See BioWorld Today, June 26, 2002.)

"We had settled on the compound, and the folks let go [in June] were doing basic research on small-molecule drugs," Okarma said. Now, the focus is even stronger on the early development work, which will be contracted out, he added, so more researchers are being let go.

The latest move leaves 51 employees in Menlo Park, 27 scientists at the Roslin Institute in Scotland, and teams in several academic labs collaborating on the hESC programs. Geron bought Scotland-based Roslin Bio-Med, a company formed by the Roslin Institute, in a stock swap valued at $26 million in 1999. (See BioWorld Today, May 5, 1999.)

GRN163, a short thiophosphoramidate oligonucleotide that inhibits telomerase, has completed preclinical efficacy studies and is undergoing toxicology testing, with an investigational new drug application filing planned in the next 12 months.

HESC-derived neural cells are in animal proof-of-concept studies for spinal-cord injury and Parkinson's disease, along with hematopoietic cells for transplantation, and cardiomyocytes for heart failure. Similar studies are planned for hESC-derived pancreatic islet cells.

Geron's goal now is not only to get the IND filed for GRN163 in the next 12 months, but also to complete enrollment in a Phase I trial of a telomerase-based vaccine at Duke University Medical Center and put hESC-derived cells into animal testing.

The company has cardiomyocytes, two types of neural cells - dopaminergic neurons and oligodendrocytes - and hematopoietic cells already in animal models, and aims to add insulin-producing pancreatic islet cells soon, with hopes of showing in vivo efficacy and safety for all of the cell types during this year.

The company has a partnership with GTI, a subsidiary of Basel, Switzerland-based Novartis AG, for an oncolytic virus. Dendreon Corp., of Seattle, has licensed rights from Geron for the use of human telomerase as an antigen in Dendreon's therapeutic cancer vaccines.

Modex Therapeutics SA, of Lausanne, Switzerland, is in a nonexclusive license agreement with Geron for the use of Geron's telomerase technology in Modex's Encapsulated Cell Therapy system.

Even further back in Geron's history is a deal for in vitro cancer diagnostics with then-Boehringer Mannheim GmbH, of Mannheim, Germany, entered in 1997. The German firm was acquired by Roche Holdings Ltd., of Basel, Switzerland, that year. (See BioWorld Today, May 28, 1997.)

"It used to be in this company that we had a lot of people on multiple teams on both sides, the stem cell and the cancer side," Okarma said, noting that "a lot of the basic research can be done by the same people," and Geron has taken the emphasis off research.

"Now, even a lot of the stem cell work is in development," he said.

Geron's stock (NASDAQ:GERN) fell 25.9 cents Wednesday to close at $2.74.