CellVoyant secures 7.6 million seed funding to develop stem cell therapies with AI – BioPharma-Reporter.com

Led by Octopus Ventures, with participation from Horizons Ventures, Verve Ventures, and Air Street Capital, this funding marks the first stage in commercialising CellVoyant's AI and imaging platforms.

The company aims to enable the cost-effective and rapid development of novel cell therapies. The proceeds from this funding round will be used to increase headcount, expand laboratory and experimental infrastructure, and support R&D.

Rafael E. Carazo Salas, CEO and founder of CellVoyant, said: Cell therapies have the potential to revolutionise the way we treat diseases that affect millions of people every year. By combining the latest advances in AI and live cell imaging, we can help bring these transformative treatments to the market quickly, reliably, and cost-effectively. Todays milestone validates the potential of our approach and will help us to accelerate our R&D capabilities.

Stem cells unlock a range of treatment possibilities that have not previously been available to patients. Current treatment options act on the bodys existing cells, while stem cells can develop into many different cell types in the body - regenerating damaged tissues and organs or replacing dysfunctional and dead cells.

There are already promising potential applications in chronic diseases, such as cancer, and metabolic diseases like diabetes and age-related macular degeneration. In future, stem cells could be used to alleviate currently untreatable conditions like dementia, fertility, and spinal cord injury.

Stem cell biology is complex and unpredictable, and producing pure, viable populations of stem cell derivatives at clinical scale can be slow and challenging.

In fact, 84% of cell therapy assets fail within two years of development, and 47% of cell therapy assets still fail after the five-year point in development.

CellVoyants platform combines advanced AI with live cell imaging to address these concerns.

Its technology can extract spatial and temporal information in real-time from hundreds of millions of cells within complex cell mixtures, helping scientists understand their composition and forecast how they will evolve.

This allows them to forecast stem cell behaviour with unprecedented precision and find optimal pathways for differentiating cells into specific cell types, such as nerve, cardiac or blood, facilitating more effective development of cell therapies.

According to the company, its technology can improve target cell yields, reduce time, and can offer potential savings of $10 100 million per therapy.

Uzma Choudry, Lead Biotech Investor at Octopus Ventures, added: University spin-outs like CellVoyant are at the heart of the UKs thriving biotech ecosystem. CellVoyant sets a new standard in precision and reliability for predicting and controlling stem cell behaviour, which will make cell therapies more accessible to those who need them. We are thrilled to invest into a company that is transforming how patients can benefit from life-changing treatments.

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CellVoyant secures 7.6 million seed funding to develop stem cell therapies with AI - BioPharma-Reporter.com

Researchers genetically modify stem cells to evade immunological rejection – University of Arizona

One of the biggest barriers to regenerative medicine is immunological rejection by the recipient, a problem researchers at the University of Arizona Health Sciences are one step closer to solving after genetically modifying pluripotent stem cells to evade immune recognition. The study Engineering Human Pluripotent Stem Cell Lines to Evade Xenogeneic Transplantation Barriers waspublished in Stem Cell Reports today.

Pluripotent stem cells can turn into any type of cell in the body. The findings offer a viable path forward for pluripotent stem cell-based therapies to restore tissues that are lost in diseases such as Type 1 diabetes or macular degeneration.

There has been a lot of excitement for decades around the field of pluripotent stem cells and regenerative medicine, said principal investigator Deepta Bhattacharya, PhD, a professor in the UArizona College of Medicine Tucsons Department of Immunobiology. What we have learned from the experiences of organ transplantation is that you have to have matched donors, but the person receiving the transplant often still requires lifelong immune suppression, and that means there is increased susceptibility to infections and cancer. Weve been trying to figure out what it is that you need to do to those stem cells to keep them from getting rejected, and it looks like we have a possible solution.

To test their hypothesis, Bhattacharya and the research team used CRISPR-Cas9 technology, genetic scissors that allow scientists to make precise mutations within the genome at extremely specific locations.

Using human pluripotent stem cells, the team located the specific genes they believed were involved in immune rejection and removed them. Prior research into pluripotent stem cells and immune rejection looked at different parts of the immune system in isolation. Bhattacharya and his colleagues from The New York Stem Cell Foundation Research Institute, St. Jude Childrens Research Hospital and the Washington University School of Medicine opted to test their genetically modified stem cells in a complete and functional immune system.

The immune system is really complicated and there are all sorts of ways it can recognize and reject things, said Bhattacharya, a member of the UArizona Cancer Center and the BIO5 Institute who also serves on the UArizona Health Sciences Center for Advanced Molecular and Immunological Therapies advisory council.

Transplantation across species, across the xenogeneic barrier, is difficult and is a very high bar for transplantation. We decided if we could overcome that barrier, then we could start to have confidence that we can overcome what should be a simpler human-to-human barrier, and so thats basically what we did.

The research team tested the modified stem cells by placing them into mice with normal, fully functioning immune systems. The results were promising the genetically engineered pluripotent stem cells were integrated and persisted without being rejected.

That has been the holy grail for a while. You might actually have a chance of being able to perform pluripotent stem cell-based transplants without immune suppressing the person who is receiving them. That would be an important advance, both clinically and from the simple standpoint of scale, Bhattacharya said. You wouldnt have to make individualized therapies for every single person you can start with one pluripotent stem cell type, turn it into the cell type you want and then give it to almost anyone.

The next steps, Bhattacharya said, include testing the genetically modified pluripotent stem cells in specific disease models. He is already working with collaborators at The New York Stem Cell Foundation and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation to test the technology in animal models for Type 1 diabetes.

We needed to overcome the immune system first. The next steps are how do we use these cells? Bhattacharya said. We set the bar pretty high for our study and the fact that we were successful gives us some confidence that this can really work.

Bhattacharya also is the co-founder of startup Clade Therapeutics in Boston, which licensed the technology through Tech Launch Arizona, the University of Arizonas commercialization arm. Clade Therapeutics is establishing a robust cellular platform using stem cell-derived immune cells for the treatment of cancer and autoimmune diseases. The company said it hopes to begin clinical trials by the end of the year.

Co-authors on the paper include: Hannah Pizzato, PhD, research specialist in the College of Medicine Tucsons Department of Immunobiology; Paula Alonso-Guallart, DVM, PhD, James Woods and Frederick J. Monsma Jr., PhD, of The New York Stem Cell Foundation Research Institute; Jon P. Connelly, PhD, and Shondra M. Pruett-Miller, PhD, of the St. Jude Childrens Research Hospital; and Todd A. Fehniger, MD, PhD, and John P. Atkinson, MD, of the Washington University School of Medicine.

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Researchers genetically modify stem cells to evade immunological rejection - University of Arizona