A collective of academic and industry players are planning to create 1,500 induced pluripotent stem cell lines from 500 patients to push forward drug discovery in areas such as diabetes, dementia and pain.

The StemBANCC project, managed by the University of Oxford , UK, and including 10 pharma companies and 23 academic institutions, is backed by €26 million from the European Union’s Innovative Medicines Initiative and €21 million of ‘in-kind’ contributions from the European pharmaceutical industry. Over five years it will derive three induced pluripotent stem cell lines from skin and blood samples taken from 500 patients that it hopes to enroll in the project. It will make these cells available to other researchers, and use them within the project to develop new tools for drug development.

Many researchers are already using stem cell lines in drug development, and to further understanding of often-complex diseases. Advocates say that human stem cells lines can provide better ways of screening potential drug molecules than traditional models, such as animals or immortalized cell lines. They are also used in toxicology testing, where they allow scientists to directly test potential drugs on, for example, liver cells or neurons (see: Stem cells take root in drug development).

Zameel Cader, a neurologist at the University of Oxford and lead academic on the StemBANCC project, says that the crucial part of this new initiative is that these cells will be from patients who actually have the diseases in question, as well as others who show specific adverse reactions to drugs, and healthy ‘control’ individuals.

“We’re specifically trying to develop a panel of lines across a range of diseases that are important to address,” says Cader. “There isn’t another institution that’s doing this at the same scale across the same range of diseases.”

If these stem cell tools can make drug development more efficient it could even arrest the decline of industry funding in neurological conditions, where drug development has proven especially expensive and tricky.

The real test will be in getting the stem cells produced by StemBANCC into the hands of researchers in a way that actually does this. “In some ways the generation of the biobank is the easy part … relatively speaking,” Cader told journalists in London today.

This article is reproduced with permission from the magazine Nature. The article was first published on December 5, 2012.

3 Comments

1. 1. rshoff 08:21 PM 12/7/12

   Really stupid question here, but I've been wondering... Does this mean the descendants of the 500 people will benefit more than the descendants of people unrelated to the donors? For example, will the treatments and therapies discovered or developed based on these stem cells align more closely with the genetics of the donors' descendants?

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2. 2. justyntoo 06:50 PM 12/8/12

   no , or , almost not . there is normal variances of genetic standards for livers , but the immune system is the main source of disease prevention . how a liver cell responds to a drug can vary but is usually within parameters . usage of those cells which are more suseptable to the disease will give a - worst case scenareo - type of response level and leads to a line of study that will treat the most likely first , then the treatment can be tweeked to help those more resistant .

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3. 3. alan6302 in reply to rshoff 07:29 PM 12/8/12

   Pharma will do their very best, unless they don't like you.

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