Human Longevity, Celgene Form Stem Cell Collaboration

By Lori Clapper

Human Longevity, a genomics and cell therapy-based diagnostic and therapeutic company, announced Monday it signed an agreement with Celgene Cellular Therapeutics (CCT) to license, develop, and co-promote Celgene’s proprietary placental cell population, PSC-100.

In the partnership, HLI will utilize its sequencing technology to characterize PSC-100 at the molecular level to complement data CCT has gleaned from PSC-100 in Phase 1 human studies. HLI’s Co-Founder Dr. Hariri and his team were the first to discover and characterize pluripotent stem cells from the placenta. The team also developed PSC-100.

In addition to HLI’s own work in stem cells, the collaboration with CCT offers HLI a vital and immediate opportunity for stem cell and cellular therapeutic research and development.

“We think that cellular based therapeutics combined with our genomics based discovery systems offer exciting potential for age-related diseases,” J. Craig Venter, Ph.D., HLI CEO and co-founder, said.  “PSC-100 provides an advanced basis of testing cell therapy for diseases like sarcopenia.”

HLI’s overarching goal is to tackle diseases associated with aging as well as to develop cell-based therapeutics to address age-related decline in endogenous stem cell function. The company’s partnership with CCT provides the opportunity to further explore sarcopenia, which is one such condition associated with biological decline, including loss of skeletal muscle mass, quality, and strength. CCT also has interest in these types of diseases and has made an equity investment in HLI.

Launched in March 2014 by co-founders J. Craig Venter, Ph.D., Robert Hariri, M.D., Ph.D., and Peter H. Diamandis, M.D., HLI’s  theory is that as the human body ages “many biological changes occur, including substantial changes and degradation to the genome of the differentiated, specialized cells found in all body tissues,”  according to HLI.