Heriot-Watt University joins ITI Life Sciences" stem cell technologies r&d programme

Heriot-Watt University, near Edinburgh, has joined ITI Life Sciences" £9.5m stem cell technologies r&d programme, which started in January 2007.

It will join two other leading Scottish universities, Glasgow and Dundee, and biotech firm Cellartis in a research programme to develop new technologies to automate the production of high quality human stem cells. Such cells are expected to be extremely valuable tools for pharmaceutical companies, enabling them to test new drug candidates for activity (efficacy) and toxicity in biologically and disease-relevant human cells.

Heriot-Watt joins the ITI programme as it advances through its second phase of development. This phase began in May 2007 and is designed to identify new compounds that induce human embryonic stem (hES) cells to differentiate into desired cell types, such as heart or liver cells. Heriot-Watt will use its expertise in medicinal chemistry to optimise the most promising compounds to improve their performance and ability to induce, consistently and controllably, the desired changes in hES cells.

It is expected that these compounds will then be incorporated into an automated process designed to produce stem cells in sufficient quantity for high-throughput screening in drug discovery and development, and to enable scale-up to facilitate commercial and clinical exploitation.

"Heriot-Watt University joining the programme is particularly pleasing as it expands its scope to access the research expertise resident in a third Scottish university," said Dr Eleanor Mitchell, managing director of ITI Life Sciences. "This is a great example of the joined-up thinking and innovative nature of the ITI model, as well as being a strong advertisement for the high quality of life sciences academic research in Scotland."

The ITI programme will use pre-existing human embryonic stem (hES) cell lines and aims to create a robust and standardised procedure for generating multiple human cell lines from undifferentiated hES cells, which can be used to test new pharmaceutical drugs. ITI Life Sciences will own all intellectual property generated by the programme.