Jackson awarded $12,500 MTI grant to commercialize new stem cell technologies

Date: March 13, 2009

Bar Harbor, Maine - The Maine Technology Institute has awarded The Jackson Laboratory a $12,500 seed grant to investigate new stem cell technologies that could advance the future of personalized medicine.

Embryonic stem (ES) cells have the capacity to grow into any kind of cell in the body: heart, lung, pancreas, liver, etc., and thus hold promise for repairing or even reconstructing organs damaged by diabetes, cancer or other diseases. However, there's a built-in problem: Tissues created from any source besides the patient's own cells could be rejected by the patient's body, yet the patient's own ES cells are not available because they are present only in very early human embryos.

Enter new technologies for converting adult cells of the body into embryonic-like stem cells by adding a combination of reprogramming factors. Under the MTI grant, the Jackson researchers will conduct a study of whether these so-called induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells do indeed function as ES cells would.

Dr. Anne Greenlee, manager of the JAX Stem Cell & Primary Cell Group and the principal investigator on the grant, explains that because every mouse in a given strain is genetically identical, it's possible to compare mouse ES cells and iPS cells from the same strain as if they were from the same individual. "This will be an important step in establishing whether iPS cells could someday be harvested from an individual patient and used as a kind of 'replacement parts kit' for that patient's own diseased tissues."

The immediate goal of the grant project, Dr. Greenlee says, is to "establish and standardize the quality of these JAX® Mice stem cell lines, so they can be distributed to researchers around the world who are working to develop new treatments for human diseases."

The MTI funding requires a $14,790 match, which the Laboratory is providing in the form of staff, services and equipment. Dr. Greenlee will be joined on the project by co-investigator Michael Wiles, Ph.D., Jackson senior director of technology evaluation and development, and biomedical technologist Sadie Murdie. The project will also provide a 12-week, National Institutes of Health-funded training opportunity for University of Wisconsin graduate student Kimberly Toops.

The Jackson Laboratory is an independent, nonprofit biomedical research institution based in Bar Harbor, Maine, with a facility in Sacramento, Calif. Its mission is to discover the genetic basis for preventing, treating and curing human diseases, and to enable research and education for the global biomedical community. The Laboratory is the worldÕs source for more than 4,000 strains of genetically defined mice, is home of the mouse genome database and is an international hub for scientific courses, conferences, training and education.

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