The U.S. National Stem Cell Bank (NSCB) has announced that it has received deposits of two human embryonic stem cell lines from Cellartis AB, a biotechnology company based in Sweden. With the addition of the new lines, the National Stem Cell Bank now has received all 21 cell lines from the six providers listed on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) federal registry.
Currently, 16 of these lines have completed the NSCB’s extensive quality control process and are available for distribution to research scientists around the world. The NSCB’s initial testing process, which can take several months or longer to finalize, begins upon receipt of a new cell line and is carried out to ensure the identity of the cell line, cell characteristics and that the starting cell material is free from contaminants.
The NIH established the country’s first National Stem Cell Bank at the WiCell Research Institute, a private, nonprofit supporting organization to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in September 2005. Its mission is to obtain, characterize and distribute the 21 human embryonic stem cell lines that currently may be used in U.S. federally funded research. All six providers of the NIH-registry stem cell lines – WiCell at UW-Madison, University of California, San Francisco, and Novocell in the U.S.; ES Cell International (ESI) in Singapore; Technion in Israel; and Cellartis in Sweden – were invited to deposit their cells by the NSCB shortly after it was established.
Derek Hei, a UW-Madison researcher and leader of the NSCB, says the availability of a variety of human embryonic stem cell lines for study is critical to advancing the field. “The addition of the Cellartis lines to the National Stem Cell Bank is extremely important because now we’ll be able to distribute these lines to the worldwide research community,” he says. “We’ll also be able to generate data unique to these lines that is valuable to the advancement of stem cell research.”
Mats Lundwall, CEO of Cellartis, says, “We are delighted to have this collaboration with the U.S. National Stem Cell Bank that will increase the amount of NIH eligible lines readily available in the U.S. The Cellartis cell lines are among the most extensively characterized in the world and now their distribution within the U.S. has been further facilitated through this partnership.”
Source: University of Wisconsin, USA