Europe-Wide Stem Cell Consortium Formed

A Europe-wide consortium of over 20 universities and 10 pharmaceutical companies, led by Oxford University and the drug firm Roche, is planning to generate a giant resource of stem cells that they will derive from patients’ skin or blood cells.

The consortium called the StemBANCC aims to derive 1, 500 stem cell lines from 500 patients across eight diseases, using the techniques developed by Japanese scientist Shinya Yamanaka that won him a share of this year’s Nobel Prize for Physiology. “The proof of concept is there, ” said Martin Graf, StemBANCC coordinator and head of Roche’s Stem Cell Platform in Basel, Switzerland. “We now plan to create 1, 500 iPS cell lines from 500 patients.”Among the diseases to be covered are Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and diabetes.

The researchers plan to use the induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) to generate different tissue types—nerve cells, heart muscle, blood vessels, liver or pancreas cells—against which drug compounds can be screened. The researchers believe that testing drug candidates from the start in cells derived from patients—and so are directly relevant to the disease—will be much more relevant for coming up with effective treatments.

“It’s the perfect platform for finding drugs. It’s superior because we are looking directly at human cells from the patient, capturing the genetic complexity of the disease, ” said Zameel Cader, M.D. a consultant neurologist at the University of Oxford and principal scientist of StemBANCC. Currently, he added, many drugs fail late on in development because the tests used in the initial stages simply do not reflect what happens when the drug is administered in patients.

StemBANCC would provide a supply of cells directly from patients that “recapitulate” the disease in the lab and against which compounds can be tested from the start, the researchers say. As Cader explained, “The generation of the [stem cell] bank is the easy part, relatively speaking. The harder part is to show we can identify abnormalities [in the cell lines] relevant to disease. It will be hard. But if we find them, it will be superb. We can then apply [drug] compounds into our assays [lab-based tests] and see if these compounds correct the cellular abnormalities.”

StemBANCC is funded for five years with 55.6 million British pounds. Some came from the European Union’s Innovative Medicines Initiative. Much of the remainder came from the participating drug firms in the European pharmaceutical industry association EFPIA.