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Stemcell Technologies Inc.

Summary

STEMCELL Technologies Inc. is a biotechnology company that develops, manufactures and sells products and services that support life science researchers. The company specializes in developing cell culture media, cell separation products, instruments and other reagents for use in stem cell, immunology, cancer, regenerative medicine and cellular therapy research. STEMCELL’s Research and Development team often collaborates with academic (iPS Academia PR; Lawson PR; Salk PR; HUB) and industrial (Accletta PR) partners to develop, produce and distribute products specific to a given research field. STEMCELL has helped several scientific technologies born in academic research settings to reach the global biotechnology market. STEMCELL is headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, and has offices in eight countries including the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Australia, Singapore and China, as well as distributors in approximately 80 other countries. STEMCELL is the largest biotechnology company in Canada, currently employing more than 800 people globally and offers a catalogue of more than 2,200 products.

History

Allen Eaves (MD, PhD, FRCPC), a hematologist and cancer researcher, co-founded the Terry Fox Laboratories (TFL) in Vancouver with his wife, Connie Eaves, in 1981. Unsatisfied with commercially available cell culture reagents, Allen Eaves’ research group at the TFL began making their own media for culturing hematopoietic stem cells. Eaves eventually began to sell the media to other research groups around the world. Production ultimately warranted building a designated clean room, which the TFL did not have the funding to provide. Instead, Eaves purchased the business from the TFL, creating an independent company with a loan from Western Economic Diversification and a mortgage on his house. STEMCELL Technologies Inc. was launched on July 2, 1993. In its first year, STEMCELL employed eight people and, selling only cell culture media for growing hematopoietic stem cells, generated $1 million in sales. The company has since seen steady annual growth. STEMCELL has gradually expanded their product portfolio to include immune cell isolation tools as well as products that support research using pluripotent stem cells and mesenchymal stem cells. The company also sells tissue-specific products for use in neural, mammary, prostate, pulmonary, pancreatic, and intestinal cell lineages. STEMCELL’s bioengineering division develops labware and instruments and offers custom assay services. In March 2015, STEMCELL was named Life Sciences Company of the Year by Life Sciences BC (LSBC). In June 2015, the company was awarded BIOTECanada’s Biotech Company of the Year award at the Gold Leaf Awards ceremony at the BIO International Convention in Philadelphia (BIOTECanada). STEMCELL remains the largest biotech company in Canada. Allen Eaves currently serves as the President and CEO.

Research Applications

STEMCELL offers a catalogue of more than 2,200 products that support cell biology research in the academic, industrial and pharma sectors. STEMCELL’s products are designed to streamline experimental protocols, increase the accuracy and reproducibility of results, enable high-throughput sample processing and data analysis, and provide increased biological relevance in cell-based biomedical research. STEMCELL’s products are specialized to a variety of cell and tissue types and targeted research applications. STEMCELL’s products are developed by in-house scientists, often in collaboration with academic or other industrial partners. The company’s products have been cited in thousands of scientific research papers.

Pluripotent Stem (PS) Cell Research

Stem cell research celebrated a major breakthrough when human embryonic stem cells (ES cells) and induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) were successfully derived for the first time in 1998 and 2007, respectively. Since these advancements, researchers have been using PS cells (ES and iPS cells) to develop tissue models for basic research, as well as applications such as drug development, tissue regeneration, and targeted cellular and gene therapies. The experimental workflow for PS cells includes reprogramming of adult somatic cells (for iPS cells), maintenance of pluripotency, passaging of cell cultures for expansion, directed differentiation of the PS cells into specific downstream cell types, and cryopreservation for long-term storage. STEMCELL sells specialized culture media for mouse and human PS cells for each of these stages, as well as accessory products such as cytokines and small molecules. Initial works using human ES and iPS cells involved culturing PS cells in a feeder-dependent media system, which contained mouse embryonic fibroblasts as feeder cells to support the cultured cells. [Ref publication]Ref;Ref;Ref. As PS cell research continues to advance towards clinical applications, the demand for a feeder-independent, or feeder-free, and serum-free culture system is increasing. STEMCELL’s cell culture media, which center around the TeSR™ family of feeder-free media, are based on published formulations from the laboratory of James Thomson (Thompson). The original TesR™ media, mTeSR-1™, a feeder-free medium for the culture of PS cells, has an extensive publication record (reference) and has been used to successfully maintain hundreds of ES and iPS cell lines in 46 countries (STI PSC countries). In the interest of minimizing batch-to-batch variations and preventing possible interference from non-human components, the demand for serum-free and xeno-free cell culture systems has greatly increased. STEMCELL has developed several variations of the TeSR™ formulation that are optimized for specific steps in the PS cell workflow, including TeSR-E8™, a xeno-free, chemically defined medium based on the published E8 formulation (Chen; Beers) that contains the eight most essential components required for human PS cell maintenance.

External links

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