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Driving stem cells to the clinic
April 2013
EDIT CONNECT
SHARING OPTIONS:
CARLSBAD, Calif.—Life Technologies Corp. has signed a
collaborative
research agreement and related license with Harvard University,
giving Life Technologies exclusive rights to develop a panel of
characterization assays designed to rapidly evaluate human pluripotent stem
(hPS)
cells potentially useful in many discovery and translational research
applications.
The
collaborative research agreement is for 16 months with
options to extend it, according to Dr. Chris Armstrong, general manager and
vice president of
primary and stem cell systems at Life Technologies, a global
biotechnology company providing products and services for scientific research,
genetic
analysis and applied sciences.
The license, which expands Life Technologies' growing
portfolio of stem
cell research products and deepens its commitment to
customers in the field, is based on a panel of assays developed by Dr. Alex
Meissner, associate
professor in the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative
Biology at Harvard University, and is being further studied and validated in
collaboration with Life Technologies. The panel, which will be offered
on Life
Technologies' semiconductor sequencing and PCR-based genetic analysis
platforms, is designed to help overcome major hurdles that impede stem
cell
technology from delivering on the promise of disease modeling and ultimately
moving into the clinic.
"Stem cell researchers spend 35 percent of their time on
characterization for evaluating pluripotency—the potential for
induced
pluripotent stem (iPS) cells to differentiate into any cell type—because many
of the techniques have not been standardized," Armstrong
explains. "They are
costly and produce ambiguous results. There is a need to consistently
characterize and do quality-control checks on the cells
being produced. Because
the research is attractive, a lot of cells are being produced, and they require
a lot of characterization."
In fact, BioInformatics
LLC estimates the global stem cell
characterization market at $30 million per year, while the overall market for
the stem cell research tools is
approximately $1 billion. It's growing at a low
double-digit percentage, according to Armstrong.
Pluripotent stem cells may be used to understand where
diseases originate. If high-quality starting materials can be differentiated
for cells of
interest, researchers can see what causes disorders at the
cellular level. In regenerative medicine, researchers can take a patient
sample, correct it
and reintroduce it into the body.
"There's a lot of opportunity," Armstrong says. "With the
discovery of iPSC technology, researchers can potentially make any cell type in
the body from any human being on the planet."
Life Technologies surveyed the academic community and found
that Meissner's laboratory had "a deep understanding of the
molecular networks
important in pluripotency and the associated capabilities that would help
create assays that we wanted to bring to the research
community," says
Armstrong. By measuring gene activity in iPS cells against the study's gene
expression range, his lab was able to accurately score
cells for their
potential to differentiate into particular cell lineages.
Meissner, whose study was
published in the journal Cell in 2011 and identified a range of
expression levels
among key genes associated with pluripotency, says he believes that "stem cell
research and genomics have rapidly advanced in
parallel over the past few
years." He adds, "Combining both fields of study is enabling more effective and
standardized ways of characterizing
pluripotent cells and, therefore, greatly
improving efficiency and the application of iPS cells."
The collaboration with Harvard is the third major license agreement
in less than a year for Life Technologies' Primary and Stem Cell Systems
group.
In June 2012, the company retained the non-exclusive global rights from iPS
Academia Japan for its iPS cell patent portfolio, enabling Life
Technologies to
expand its range of products and services. That same month, Life Technologies
entered into a partnership with Cellular Dynamics International, a producer of
human cells
derived from (iPS) cells, to commercialize a set of new products
optimized to consistently develop and grow human iPS cells.
Also in 2012, Life Technologies introduced a DNA sequencing
technology in which scalable, low-cost semiconductor
manufacturing techniques
were used to make an integrated circuit to directly perform non-optical DNA
sequencing of genomes. It enabled researchers to
obtain sequence data by
directly sensing the ions produced by template-directed DNA polymerase
synthesis using all-natural nucleotides on the massively
parallel
semiconductor-sensing device or ion chip, thus enabling low-cost, large-scale
production and scaling of the device to higher densities and
larger array
sizes.
"Isolating and characterizing pluripotent stem cells efficiently is critical to enhancing the use of this technology in the market, and will be a foundational component of driving stem cell technology to the clinic," Armstrong says. "Scientists can use them to understand disease and use modified cells as therapy. We're deploying technologies in the company to support scientists in those endeavors." Code: E041311 Back |
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