By far the most interesting of BioTime's subsidiaries, however, is ReCyte Therapeutics. The current culmination of West's career, ReCyte is located in BioTime's northern California headquarters so West can be personally involved developing iPS therapy for large-scale cardiovascular and immune system regeneration.

The company's clearly stated mission statement is to “reverse the developmental aging of human cells” for“age-related cardiovascular and blood disorders.” This market approaches $1 trillion world-wide as it is the leading cause of death in most industrialized countries. It is amazing that with all the interest regenerative medicine has attracted in the medical community that the disproportionate size of this application wasn't more appreciated by BioTime's competition.

No one suffers more from the lack of accurate public knowledge than West. The best example of this knowledge gap is in the routine misreporting about the origins of iPS technology.

Professor Shinya Yamanaka is usually given credit for discovering that the introduction of certain genes into a cell will initiate a transformation of that cell into an iPS cell. While Yamanaka's work demonstrating this effect is certainly important, West applied for a patent on the process before Yamanaka. He did so in August 2005 while he was chief scientist at ACT and has bought rights to the technology since moving to BioTime.

I've asked West why he has never challenged accounts of the iPS discovery but he's expressed only an interest in maintaining rights to perform the process for therapeutic processes. There are several aspects to West's discovery of the iPS transformation process that we need to understand, however. The first is that his understanding came about not through the exhaustive experimentation that Yamanaka and his team performed. Rather, it was a realization based on his profound understanding of human cells.

More importantly, West explained to me several years ago that the Yamanaka procedure, using viruses to deliver genes, is a medical nonstarter. Researchers using the technique have assumed that, once viruses have altered the host cell's DNA, they would be inactive. This was a dubious assumption for several reasons that are now becoming clear to everyone. BioTime's technology circumvents these problems and was designed to be utilized on an industrial scale.
West told me once, in fact, that it's always been clear that genes produce RNA, which produce proteins so any of the three can be used to reprogram cells. Clear to him, I suppose. The important point is that he launched ReCyte to commercialize the process of creating endothelial precursor stem cells from a donor's own iPS cells. Those endothelial precursors will reverse the telomere clock of cellular aging in the recipients cardiovascular and eventually immune system. This will not just prevent heart disease, it will extend your cardiac warranty by as much as a hundred years. For most people, who are more likely to die of heart disease than any other cause, this will translate into decades of additional healthy life.