Allele Biotech Receives $200,000 Grant to Update Its mRNA Reprogramming Commercial Products and Services

On June 10, 2013 Allele received an SBIR award from the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA/NIH) entitled “Revolutionary Technology for Efficient Derivation of Human iPSCs with Messenger RNA”. The goal of the proposed project is to provide to the biomedical research market an advanced reagent kit and services for highly efficient reprogramming of high quality human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). At the core of this kit is the Allele team’s recent development transcribed messenger RNA (mRNA). Compared to other reprogramming methods, such as lentivirus, Sendai virus, protein, small molecules or any combinations of these reagents, our new generation of the mRNA method often requires less than half the time while sometimes achieving “bulk conversion” efficiency.

While the Allele reprogramming technology was designed for clinical use as the process is feeder-free, xeno-free, chromosome integration-free, as well as without the need for cell splitting, PI, Dr. Jiwu Wang states, “Our purpose of executing the NIH-funded research it to make our method so easy that any researcher can integrate iPSC into his or her projects.” In addition to the extremely high efficiency, mRNA-generated iPSCs should also be more stable because there are no genetic alterations, more uniform among all clones as there is no clonal event, and ultimately suitable for future autologous cell therapy now that creating iPSCs from patient tissue cells should no longer be the rate-limiting steps.

Allele’s business model is to provide cGMP-grade iPSCs to pharmaceutical companies and perform large scale reprogramming by partnering first with university-affiliated hospitals. Great progress has been made in both directions, which has prompted the initiation of a cGMP unit within Allele’s newly acquired building in San Diego.