Dec. 10 at 6:22 PM
$SANA this was a Twitter post from Jasbinder Chimni on Nov 15. On in Q3 update Brian, CEO of
$LCTX, made some very interesting points about the challenges of scaling iPSC derived islet cells. Same problem that Steve Harr, CEO of
$SANA, has been discussing for a couple of years.
Brian Culley stated: "while a single pluripotent cell can give rise to thousands of RPE cells in our system, you can only get a dozen or so islet cells from each pluripotent cell that you start with"
That's roughly a 100-1000x difference in cell expansion between the two cell types. This is devastating for manufacturing economics.
With anticipated dose levels of 1 billion cells per patient, the low expansion rate means "you're not really a commercially viable product until and unless you can overcome the biological ceiling imposed by the generally accepted differentiation processes"
