3 stem cell patents issued last week

Dear manoj kumar valluru,

Last week 3 patents of relevance to the area of stem cells were issued.

1. # 7,326,571 (Patent Spotlight), teaches how use de-cellularized bone marrow as a matrix for cell delivery.

2. # 7,326,572 discloses a new way of generating endoderm from ES cells.

3. # 7,326,690 covers treatment of metabolic disorders with phthalazinediones.

In The News

Pancreatic Cancer Stem Cells

Monday February 4th, 2008 @ 04:39:46 EST

Wuhan, China -

The concept of cancer stem cells has been around for a while. One could say that initially the concept of cancer stem cells was discovered in the hematopoietic system where the group of Dr Dick from Toronto was able to induce human leukemias in mice with injection of as little as 5-10 cells per mouse. Under normal circumstances if one takes leukemic blasts from patients and tries to induce leukemia in the immune deficient mouse, it takes thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of cells to be able to induce leukemia. Dr Dick's group, interestingly enough, also identified the colon cancer stem cell in late 2006. There are patents covering the isolation and use of cancer stem cells for drug development as well, activities in this area usually are very lucrative, as represented by the 1.5 Billion dollar deal between GSK and the cancer stem cell company Oncomed

In a recent paper _(Zhou et al. Persistence of side population cells with high drug efflux capacity in pancreatic cancer. World J Gastroenterol. 2008 Feb 14;14:925-30)_ the widely used human pancreatic cancer cell line, PANC-1 was assessed for stem cell content within the cell line population. Investigators used 2 techniques for identifying stem cell content. The first one involved assessing for a side population cells, and the other one examines expression of drug efflux proteins.

The investigators demonstrated that the cell line PANC-1 expresses a population of side positive cells that comprises about 2.1-8.7 percent of the overall PANCR-1 cell population. Interestingly when the PANC-1 cells were treated with the chemotherapeutic agent Gemcitabine, the number of side positive cells approximately tripled, which was associated with increased expression of the drug efflux transporters ABCB1 and ABCG2.

These data suggest that even in cell line populations one may be able to isolate "cancer stem cells".

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This Week's Patent Spotlight

Decellularized bone marrow extracellular matrix

Patent Number: 7,326,571

Assignee | Inventor

Numerous patents have been filed on de-cellularized tissues for use as matrices. For example, patent # 6,696,074 teaches that various fetal tissues may be de-cellularized and used as scaffolds. Such scaffolds may be seeded with various differentiated or stem cells, such as placental stem cells The current patent teaches the use of de-cellularized bone marrow as a scaffold.

The patent has claims covering the actual de-cellularized matrix, as well as method of treatment claims involving the use of the de-cellularized matrix.

Essentially the patent teaches that one can obtain bone marrow, treat the bone marrow with various agents and/or procedures in order to remove the cellular components, subsequently sterilizing the bone marrow, and using it for regenerating damaged tissue.

The de-cellularized extracellular matrix may be implanted in vivo in order to allow endogenous cells to colonize it, or alternatively, it may be seeded with various cells ex vivo before implantation. Additionally, growth factors may be added to the matrix.

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