Cell Therapy News/Articles, page-3495

A couple of points of clarification:

You have iPSCs and MSCs the wrong way round. The former are undifferentiated. Clue’s in the name - Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells. They can be differentiated into any kind of cell. MSCs are not pluripotent – they can become a range of different types of cell, but not any type of cell. IPSCs are of interest because they’re pluripotent, but not embryonic in origin, so no concerns about ethics.

I’m not sure what you mean when you say iPSCs are “autologous”. iPSCs are created from somatic cells by one of two procedures – one developed in Japan (for which the Nobel prize was awarded) and one at the University of Wisconsin, from where the Cynata technology comes. They are an immortal cell line – which means that they can be reproduced indefinitely. There is a small chance of spontaneous mutation, which is managed by seeding and batching, but the critical factor is that it gives you a much, much better chance of generating a reproducible, pharmaceutical grade cell-based product than if you’re repeatedly going back to the donor well. Incidentally, MSB’s cells also can mutate and probably do – but that’s less of a problem than being able to reliably produce identical pharmaceutical grade produce time after time, from different donors. Cynata, really only need one cell donor ever. I posted on this very subject a couple of years or so ago.

There’s no doubt that MSB are further down the development pathway than CYP – they’ve been around a decade longer. I don’t see them as rivals – it seems likely to me that different technology approaches will produce subtly different products, each of which find their niche. Just like every other medicine.