The hopes and dreams of regenerative medicine and the use of stem cells to treat or cure diseases have been a beacon of promise for 25 years. But after a roller coaster ride of scientific breakthroughs, clinical setbacks, policy wrangles, and an explosion of suspiciously charlatan clinics pushing unproven treatments, we are mostly still waiting for those cures.
Now bit.bio, a synthetic biology company focused on human cells and headquartered in Cambridge, England, has presented new data at the 2023 annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) conference last week in Boston that showed they can engineer stem cells with what they are calling an unparalleled level of consistency. Company officials say their achievements in the last few months will set a new standard for the manufacture of human cells, calling their innovation so disruptive they claim it will do for stem cell biology what CRISPR has done for genetics.
Bit.bio’s achievement builds on the pioneering work of Shinya Yamanaka, a professor at Kyoto University in Japan and a senior investigator at the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco, who discovered how to transform ordinary mature adult skin cells into more primitive precursor cells, which look and act like the sort of embryonic stem cells found in the early states of embryonic development in the womb.
Industrial-scale stem cells are here. @bitbio’s new approach for making pluripotent stem cells could standardize the reliable, large-scale manufacture of cells for research and therapy.#cellbasedmedicine #iPSCs #biotech #stemcells #sciencehttps://t.co/uBsbLmiFwP
— proto.life (@protolifemedia) June 22, 2023