Patients with Lou Gehrig’s disease face a dismal prognosis. The only approved drug, Sanofi-Aventis’s Rilutek, slows the fatal muscle-wasting disease by just a few months. Numerous experimental drugs have flopped in trials.

Can stem cells break the logjam?

That’s the hope behind a path-breaking new collaboration between California Stem Cell, a biotech company in Irvine, Calif.; the charitable ALS Association; and a small Belgian drug discovery company. The concept is to use motor neuron cells the biotech firm has generated from embryonic stem cells to hunt for new drugs to treat amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, more commonly called ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease.
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