Biotech entrepreneur Living Cell Technologies (LCT) says it
has traded some of its cells from its quarantine herd of New
Zealand pigs for a 10 percent stake in a US-based wound
healing company.
It has received the stake in CytoSolv Inc. in exchange for
restricted supply of choroid plexus cell clusters from its
New Zealand pig herd, which the company says is free of
modern pig diseases that might potentially be transferred
into human patients, because the pigs were marooned on a
sub-Antarctic island for nearly 200 years.
The New Zealand company has granted CytoSolv a non-exclusive,
non-transferable licence to use its broad choroid plexus
patents for wound healing.
LCT is running a clinical trial at Middlemore Hospital
treating eight diabetics with insulin-producing islet cells
from the pancreas of piglets, after research on both brain
and islet cell transplants from pigs was supported by New
Zealand taxpayers.
The company has also been working with a "bionic ear"
institute in Melbourne, to implant brain choroid plexus
cells, which produce neurotrophins, proteins that protect
brain and nerve cells from degeneration or injury, and use of
similar porcine cells has also been considered for an
incurable neurological illness, Huntington's disease.
But such implants would require years of clinical trials, and
in the meantime the company is already killing piglets to
obtain the islet cells for its diabetes treatments.
The piglets, farmed in quarantine at Invercargill for their
tissues, are descended from feral animals brought back after
the species was isolated on the Auckland Islands.
LCT has a few more pigs at a 16-animal site on the North
Shore in Auckland, which will soon have to be replaced with a
bigger operation. It has looked at some bigger sites, but
they were a long way out of the city.
LCT executives have previously said they would require about
3600 pigs producing 18,000 male piglets for slaughter to
treat 1200 diabetics.
In addition to the choroid plexus cells, the company has also
been investigating whether human liver cells grown in test
tubes may be able to stop uncontrolled bleeding in
haemophiliacs.
CytoSolv -- a newly formed Rhode Island biomedical company
developing proprietary technology to address wound healing,
initially targeting diabetic ulcers -- is able to derive
wound-healing factors from porcine choroid plexus (CP) cells.
The cells normally secrete a variety of factors into the
cerebrospinal fluid that are responsible for growth,
differentiation, nurturing and maintenance of the brain, but
CytoSolv has demonstrated that a topical gel based on a
cocktail of these factors accelerates and improves the
quality of healing of open skin wounds, and it plans to
pursue pre-clinical development in the year ahead.
LCT chief executive Dr Paul Tan said: "Although this
collaboration is outside LCT's core business of live cell
implants, the topical use of secreted products from porcine
CP cells offers a potential revenue stream from supply of
cells."
