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."