Patent to Sakurada iPS in Britain

from PRNewswire:


This patent is based upon the innovative research led by Dr. Kazuhiro Sakurada, former Head of Global Drug Discovery Regenerative Medicine Bayer Schering Pharma AG. Under an agreement in 2008, the Sakurada patent estate related to iPSC technology was assigned to iZumi Bio, now iPierian.

The newly granted UK patent covers the generation of human iPS cells from human postnatal cells through any combination of forced expression of genes that includes the Oct3/4, Sox2 and Klf4 genes, so long as the combination does not include c-Myc. The elimination of c-Myc, a potentially cancer causing gene, has been an early goal of researchers in the field as an important step so that iPSC technology may one day be employed as a therapeutic for the treatment of disease. The resulting human iPS cells have in vitro long-term self-renewal ability and can differentiate into ectoderm, mesoderm and endoderm.
"This is the first patent protecting a fundamental method and utility of human iPSC technology that has been granted outside of Japan. As such, this is an important milestone for both iPierian and for the field of human cellular reprogramming," said John P. Walker, chief executive officer of iPierian.

See IPBiz post


The patent world of iPS (stem cells): Yamanaka, Bayer, and iZumi