This morning, Geron of Menlo Park, for years a leading company in embryonic stem cell research, announced that the first patient had been dosed in a study of its embryonic stem cell treatment for spinal cord injury.

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Geron's treatment for spinal cord injury was the first human embryonic stem cell therapy to receive FDA approval for a clinical trial.

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Professor Robin Franklin, a regeneration biologist at the Wellcome Trust-MRC Stem Cell Institute and report co-author, said: 'Our findings are extremely exciting because they show for the first time that transplanting these types of cell into a severely damaged spinal cord can bring about significant improvement.

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Douglas Kerr, a scientist at Johns Hopkins, which is using money from billionaire Bloomberg to create a stem-cell lab, says the lack of NIH help could delay a treatment for spinal cord injury for decades.

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