Ethical stem cell startup launches in Cambridge

Cambridge entrepreneur Jonathan Milner has launched a new, ethical stem cell business in the UKs technology capital and Axol Bioscience has shipped its maiden product just four months after startup.

The company, which is tilting at a multibillion dollar global market, has a real ace to play as its product requires no testing on animals. Its first customer is the University of Cambridge.

Neurobiology is one of the major sectors of biomedical research with an annual total public and private funding over $15 billion worldwide.

Dr Shi said the current method of studying diseases of the nervous system involved the generation of animal models. However, genetically modifying animals to mimic human disease was extremely time consuming, expensive and ethically unsound, he said.

Additionally, the models often failed to recapitulate the relevant human neuropathologies. A burning desire of many researchers is to study genuine human tissue samples however there are only very limited amounts of frozen postmortem brain tissue samples available for research, and using aborted foetal tissues for research is also ethically controversial.

The Nobel Prize-winning cell reprogramming technology and proprietary neural tissue generation technology together provide an opportunity to derive an unlimited amount of patient-specific brain stem cells, which can then generate functional brain tissue for neurological research.

Dr Shi said: The demand for high quality iPS cell-derived neural cells for research is increasing daily. Only four months after Jonathan and I founded the company we already have our first customers and are shipping product. It is really exciting we are working all hours just to keep up with the demand.

Co-founder Dr Jonathan Milner, who is Axols chairman, added: We live in a golden age of biology, central to which is the amazing recent discoveries of how to make stem cells from easily accessible somatic cell types which were previously believed to be irreversibly differentiated.

Axol Bioscience will be at the forefront of fulfilling demand for high quality iPS cell-derived neural cells for use in research into diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, autism and epilepsy.

There is significant market potential for clinical and academic research of neurological diseases including Alzheimers, autism, epilepsy, traumatic brain injury and stroke. iPS cells derived from patients can be differentiated into various cell types which will exhibit the functional properties of the disease in vitro.

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Ethical stem cell startup launches in Cambridge