BresaGen claims stem cell breakthrough

Adelaide-based company BresaGen has claimed a stem cell breakthrough, announcing that the company had successfully derived neural precursor cells from human embryonic stem cell lines.

The company has hailed the achievement as a milestone in its program to develop products to treat Parkinson's disease and other neurodegenerative disorders.

"Establishing that these neural cells can function in animal models of disease and are safe to implant brings us significantly closer to developing commercially viable cell therapy treatments for conditions such as Parkinson's disease, stroke and spinal cord injury," the company's medical director and senior vice-president, Dr Chris Juttner, told the Stem Cell Summit in Melbourne yesterday.

The proprietary differentiation technology was based on research originally developed in mice by Prof Peter Rathjen at Adelaide University.

The embryonic stem cells are grown in Med II medium, a conditioned growth medium made from HepG2 liver cells which contains a novel neural inducing factor that drives the differentiation of the cells down the neural pathway.

Juttner said the process for differentiating the cells was scalable and offered a more pure population of neural precursor cells. It has been shown to work in primate as well as mouse and human embryonic stem cell lines, he said.

Now the company is in the process of evaluating the safety, survival and functionality of the neural precursor cells by testing the cells in a rat model for Parkinson's disease, developed by Curt Freed at the University of Colorado.

Juttner said that it was well established that injection of neural cells derived from foetuses could reverse Parkinson's disease in the rat model, adding that the model was a very valuable tool and was partially quantitative.

He said that BresaGen would be continuing to evaluate the data and would release more results when available. The company is also in the process of obtaining patents for the technology.

Breakthrough timely

Yesterday's announcement came just two days after the company announced that it would be shedding nine jobs and imposing a hiring freeze, after winding up a collaboration with British Biotech.

The collaboration broke up after independent tests could not confirm previous assessments of the commercial prospects of BresaGen's E21R drug. CEO Dr John Smeaton said the company was imposing cost-cutting measures, after which it would have enough funding for at least 18 months.

At the time, Smeaton said that BresaGen was making "significant progress" in the other parts of the business.