Plasticell is developing methods of expanding hematopoietic stem cells, which can be used in the treatment of over 70 different therapeutic indications.
Hematopoietic stem cell transplantation is the most successful and widely used stem cell therapy to date. It is used to treat conditions where the resident immune system has been compromised through disease or chemo-radiotherapeutic treatment. Hematopoietic stem cells (HSC) can be obtained from mobilised peripheral blood (mPB), bone marrow (BM) or cord blood (CB), with CB offering a relatively higher proportion of stem cells and a significantly lower risk of rejection. However, each CB unit contains only enough cells to treat small children and therefore methods of expanding the stem cells are required.
Plasticell has developed potent media compositions to expand hematopoetic stem cells in vitro by factors of up to 500-fold and is developing GMP-compliant bioprocesses for manufacture of CB and BM life-saving therapies.
The global market for cord blood therapeutics is estimated to be US$6.5bn per year and growing.