SCS establishes Japan's first stem cell company

Melbourne's Stem Cell Sciences (SCS) has added another block to its global network with the establishment of Japan's first stem cell company.

In a joint collaboration with private Japanese biopharmaceutical company Sosei, SCS has set up Stem Cell Sciences KK (SCS KK) within the new Kobe Frontier Medicine Precinct.

SCS's CEO Dr Peter Mountford said the initiative would not only expand his company's network, but also give it exposure to a country committed to developing its biotechnology industry.

"This is really the third step in the globalisation of SCS, and what we're doing is setting up the company in regions where there's outstanding scientific capability and a market for cell therapies," Mountford said.

"Now we are gathering technologies through these academic centres of excellence and commercial networks and combining them in a global alliance that we can use to develop other technologies to deliver cell therapies."

The new member of the SCS stable means the company now has exposure throughout Australia, Asia and Europe through the University of Edinburgh Centre for Genome Research.

Mountford said that while Japan had a strong history in outstanding basic medical research it had virtually no biotechnology industry.

"Japan has watched as (SCS) has commercialised research from Edinburgh and they very much want to take that step of commercialising scientific outcomes in Japan," he said. "What they are trying to do is start a biotech industry in Japan."

In stark contrast to the Australian funding experience, this was being achieved through RIKEN (equivalent to our NHMRC) funding for 150 full-time, five-year academic positions and government contributions of $US150 million for the infrastructure to build the precinct where SCS KK will reside.

Mountford said every element of the bench to bedside precinct - situated on a man-made lake in Osaka Bay - was brand new and state-of-the-art, with the only element still to be completed being a 65-bed clinical facility intended purely for frontier medical research use.

He said the collaboration gave the SCS group of companies a strategic advantage by having access to facilities that would take up to seven years to build from scratch in Australia.

SCS KK laid its roots in 1994 through the University of Edinburgh when Japanese pluripotent stem cell scientist Dr Hitoshi Niwa stepped into the post-doctoral role vacated by Mountford at that time.

Dr Niwa, together with the director of the RIKEN Centre of Developmental Biology and head of stem cell biology, Prof Shin-Ichi Nishikawa, are now central to work to be done within the SCS KK venture.

Mountford said the new company's first priority would be to establish robust and fully defined cell culture systems for growth and differentiation.

He said the SCS KK was Japan's first stem cell company and one of the nation's first biotech companies.

Acting CEO of SCS KK Kenzo Nakajima said that collaborative research and development programs with world leading stem cell researchers, together with the stem cell technology platform licensed from SCS, would enable the new company to be globally competitive.

"We, as SCS KK, envisage the initial stage of our operations will be to generate revenues through sponsored research and/or licensing of SCS discovery technologies to the Japanese pharmaceutical industry, but our medium and long-term focus will remain in the research and development of cell therapies," Nakajima said.