Cloned Stem Cells Show Important Advantage Over Adult Stem Cells
Worcester, MA, June 29, 2005 – Advanced Cell Technology, Inc. (OTCBB:ACTC.OB), and its collaborators reported today the long-term transplantation of clone-derived stem cells in an animal model of aging. Cells generated by somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) offer the potential for treatment of a wide range of degenerative diseases. The research, which was conducted by ACT and its collaborators at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, the Mayo Clinic, and the University of Pennsylvania, will appear in the June 2005 issue of Cloning and Stem Cells, a peer-reviewed journal published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. The paper demonstrates that cloned blood-forming stem cells are capable of long-term multilineage engraftment in an aged large animal model. The paper also documents an important additional advantage of SCNT—the technology can be used to generate histocompatible replacement cells that have an increased regenerative capacity. In this study, the cloned-derived stem cells showed an exponential (tenfold) competitive advantage over adult stem cells. The paper was published online ahead of print and is available free online at http://www.liebertpub.com/clo
“These cloned stem cells appear to have a powerful regenerative capacity,” said Robert Lanza, Medical Director at ACT, and first author of the paper. “The ability to regenerate an aged or defective immune system without the need for drugs, tissue matching, or the risk of graft-versus-host disease would have important implications for medicine. We hope to use this technology in the future to treat patients with diverse diseases such as marrow failure disorders, various genetic diseases and malignancies, as well as debilitating autoimmune diseases, including MS, arthritis, diabetes, and lupus.”
Nuclear transfer with Neor – marked nuclei from 10-13 year old cows was used to generate fetal liver hematopoietic stem cells. The cloned stem cells were transplanted back into nuclear donor animals both with and without myelosuppressive/ablative drugs. Cloned cells were demonstrated in the animals up to over a year in blood, lymph nodes and endothelium, peaking at levels of up to 60% in circulating progenitors and 9-11% in blood granulocytes.
“This study extends the use of SCNT-derived populations that can be transplanted without rejection to the lymphohematopoietic and endothelial lineages,” said Malcolm A.S. Moore, Professor and incumbent Enid M. Haupt Chair of Cell Biology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and senior author of the paper. “It also shows that clone-derived hematopoietic stem cells have a competitive advantage over the recipient hematopoietic stem cell population and can engraft in an unmanipulated adult animal.”
“These animal studies were designed to extend our previous work that demonstrated that SCNT was capable of resetting the clock of aging in cells. In this study we tested the feasibility of reversing the aging of cells by SCNT and transplanting young cells back into the old animal. In this case we transplanted young blood and vascular-forming cells,” said Michael D. West, ACT’s President and Chief Scientific Officer. “Gerontologists frequently say that ‘you are as old as your arteries.’ While much more work needs to be done, these studies suggest that medicine may one day be able to reset the clock of aging in aged human cells by SCNT and then use the resulting young cells to regenerate the immune and vascular system of older patients, That, certainly, is the dream of gerontologists.”
ACT’s researchers in this study collaborated with scientists from the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center of New York, New York, the Mayo Clinic of Rochester, Minnosota, the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine of Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, and Em Tran of Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania. The authors of the paper, in addition to Robert Lanza of ACT and Malcolm A.S. Moore of MSKCC, are J-H Shieh, Kaida Wu, and Anat Weisz of MSKCC, Peter J. Wettstein of the Mayo Clinic, Raymond W. Sweeney of the University of Pennsylvania, Boyd Henderson of Em Tran, and Michael D. West of ACT.
A.C.T. Holdings, Inc., a Nevada corporation, and its wholly-owned subsidiary, Advanced Cell Technology, Inc., a Delaware corporation, is a leading biotechnology company applying stem cell technology in the emerging field of regenerative medicine. The company is currently headquartered in Worcester, Massachusetts.
For more information about Advanced Cell Technology visit www.advancedcell.com
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