Manchester University and MedCell get £800K award for stem cell manufacturing

Grant | Partnership

MedCell Bioscience Ltd, a regenerative medicine company, and Manchester University have received a UK government Technology Strategy Board collaborative research and development award of £800,000 for a three-year stem cell manufacturing project.

The two partners have signed a collaborative agreement to commercialise the existing and resulting intellectual property and products.

Chris Ward, who leads the stem cell research group at Manchester University’s Dental School, has developed a technology that allows embryonic stem cells to be grown as single cell suspensions without the need for growth factors, while retaining pluripotency and viability.  

This has enabled a transition from traditional feeder layer 2D culture to 3D bio-processing without the need for feeder layers, expensive growth factors and manual/automated passaging.

MedCell (formerly known as NovaThera) has developed the NovaPod bioreactor, a compact, manual feed, disposable, batch culture bioreactor that allows researchers and scientists working on stem cells to culture in three dimensions.  MedCell’s portfolio of expansion technologies can be used with NovaPod for the mass production of pluripotent stem cells and their progeny without the need for continuous operator intervention, thereby increasing efficiency, reducing operating costs and labour hours.

“These combined technologies will provide researchers and clinicians with a low-cost route into stem cell bio-processing to generate sufficient quantities of high grade cells for pre-clinical and clinical trials,” said Ward.

“The project will roll-out research grade products for mouse and embryonic stem cell culture in NovaPod bioreactors in the early stages,” said Wesley Randle, Programme Director, Stem Cell Bio-processing, MedCell.

“It will progress to GMP grade embryonic stem cell bio-manufacture, using GMP grade products and medical device grade NovaPod systems.  This will bring embryonic stem cell usage closer to the clinic by removing the upstream bottleneck of embryonic stem cell manufacture.”