Sydney, Nov 15, 2005 AEST (ABN Newswire) - CyGenics Limited (ASX: CYN) announced today that it has entered into a collaborative research agreement with the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (Johns Hopkins), a US world leader in research and education in medicine.
The agreement details the use of CyGenics' proprietary stem cell expansion platform in combination with the Johns Hopkins stem cell purging technology, as part of a pre-clinical study directed at a new treatment strategy for patients with Acute Myeloid Leukaemia (AML).
Johns Hopkins has been conducting pre-clinical studies in ex vivo expansion of purged stem cell grafts prior to transplant. CyGenics and Johns Hopkins are collaborating to use the CyGenics' proprietary stem cell expansion platform, as the growth platform for these cells. The goal of the collaboration is to include the combined technologies into a clinical study directed at a new treatment strategy for patients with AML.
The current standard treatment for AML is chemotherapy, which often includes several courses, being successful in approximately 65% of patients. When standard chemotherapy is not successful the next option is, high-dose chemotherapy which destroys all bone marrow cells and ongoing blood cell production. Following the high-dose chemotherapy treatment, in order to restore the bone marrow, the patient receives a transplant of autologous (patient's own) stem cells. These stem cells automatically home and start producing new blood cells in the bone marrow. Patients can suffer a relapse of AML due to the presence of some residual leukaemia in the stem cell graft.
A number of studies have shown that treating the stem cell graft to kill off or purge the residual leukaemia prior to transplantation may result in better survival rates for patients undergoing the treatment. However the purging process also kills the original cells that are responsible for the early phases of blood regeneration. This results in delayed engraftment in the patient, during which time the patient is prone to infection and other complications.
CyGenics operates four subsidiaries: Singapore-based CordLife (tissue banking services, in particular, cord blood banking) and Cell Sciences (consumable cell culture products), and Cytomatrix (cell therapeutics and technology development) based in Boston, USA, and CytoVations (new product development) based in New Jersey, USA. CyGenics is listed on the Australian Stock Exchange, under the symbol CYN.
Contact
Steven Fang, CEO, CyGenics Ltd
Mob: +61 (0)400 933 243
Email: steven.fang@cygenics.com
Ian Brown, COO, CyGenics Ltd
Mob: +61 (0)438 565 212
Email: ian.brown@cygenics.com
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