Thanks to IPS cells, we’re now able to discover things that are not possible to do using animal models or any in vitro system
- Ludovic Vallier
Much has been written about the promise of stem cells for modern medicine, and cell-based therapies to treat diseases are now being developed by commercial companies in Europe and across the world. But it is their use both to screen medicinal drugs for toxicity and to identify potential new therapies which is increasingly being viewed as one that could have an immediate and far-reaching impact.
Cambridge-based company DefiniGEN supplies the pharmaceutical industry with liver and pancreatic cells that have been reprogrammed from human skin cells. These cells, known as induced pluripotent stem (IPS) cells, are used to test potential new drugs, and can also be used as in vitro models for disease.
The company spun out of the University in 2012 and is one of the first commercial opportunities to arise from Cambridge’s expertise in stem cell research. Its portfolio of products is based on the research of Dr Ludovic Vallier, Professor Roger Pedersen, Dr Tamir Rashid, Dr Nick Hannan and Dr Candy Cho at the Anne McLaren Laboratory for Regenerative Medicine (LRM) in Cambridge.
“Drug failure in the late phase of clinical development is a major challenge to finding new therapeutics which are urgently needed by a broad number of patients with major health-care problems such as diabetes,” said Vallier. “A great deal of time and money are often lost following these false leads, and this limits the capacity of pharmaceutical companies to explore novel therapies. So, identifying toxic drugs as early as possible is vital to the efficiency and safety of the drug discovery process.
“Because we use human cells, our lab has a specific philosophy that all the data we generate is used not only for fundamental research, but also relates back to the clinic,” added Vallier, who holds a joint appointment at the LRM and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, and is also Chief Scientific Officer at DefiniGEN. “We are interested in how stem cells work but we also always ask how the research we’re doing might have a clinical or translational interest.”
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Image:Testing time for stem cells
Credit: The District
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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