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news.Neuralstem, a biotechnology company, has received official notice of allowance for its patent application for stable neural stem cell lines from the US Patent and Trade Office. This patent covers the technology to immortalize any human neural stem cell, rendering its growth robust and long-lasting.
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The newly patented method uses cMyc-ER, a recombinant fusion of two proteins normally present in cells, c-Myc, a human cell-cycle regulating protein, and estrogen receptor (ER), a human protein that is activated by estrogen.
By transiently increasing the concentration of the c-Myc protein, a cell inserted with cMyc-ER is able to overcome the natural aging process inherent in the cell without losing any of its stem cell properties. The immortalized human neural stem cell can be grown for over 60 cell-doublings and is clonally expandable (that is starting from one cell), the company said.
Richard Garr, president & CEO of Neuralstem, said: The technology behind this patent allows us to grow practically unlimited quantities of neural stem cells from all regions of the brain without regard to the natural mitotic (growth) limits of cells from a particular region.
Equally important, this technology is a next-generation immortalization process that avoids the harmful effects of traditional immortalization methods, which have invariably resulted in uncontrolled growth. It will also enable, for the first time, systematic drug screening against many different kinds of normal human brain cells for new central nervous system drugs, and stem cell-mediated protein delivery for neurologic diseases.