Last week on June 21 with the start of its participation in the virtual 2021 Annual Meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research, stem cell biotechnology company Asymmetrex launched a new web portal that provides scientists free online access to calculators for important parameters used in human tissue cell research. In a June 30 post, business and technology news platform SuperbCrew interviewed Asymmetrex’s President and CEO James Sherley, M.D., Ph.D. about the new web portal.
To complement its introduction during ISSCR 2021 of an important, but previously unavailable, critical quality attribute for stem cell research and stem cell medicine, Asymmetrex established a new web portal. CQAs are factors monitored to improve the quality of manufactured products and medical treatments.
This week in an interview with SuperbCrew, Asymmetrex’s President and CEO, James Sherley, described features of the new portal and its purpose. The portal provides users free online calculators for four CQAs for human tissue cells in research, biomanufacturing, drug discovery and cell therapy.
The first three CQAs, population doubling time, cell population doublings, and cumulative population doublings are used routinely for human tissue cell applications. However, the fourth CQA, tissue stem cell-specific fraction, only recently became available. Asymmetrex’s TORTOISE TestTM kinetic stem cell (KSC) counting is the first and only technology that provides this CQA for stem cells from any human tissue.
Tissue stem cell number is an evident CQA for stem cell treatments. Transplanting too few stem cells to cancer chemotherapy patients can result in their death. Transplanting excessive stem cells wastes scarce stem cell donations. Less dire treatments in clinical trials and private clinics would be improved if physicians knew the stem cell dosage of treatments, including knowing stem cells are actually present in treatments.
In the interview, Sherley shared that the purpose of the new portal was to get scientists and physicians thinking about and using therapeutic tissue stem cell number as often and as routinely for tissue stem cell applications as the other three commonly used CQAs.
Asymmetrex, LLC is a Massachusetts life sciences company with a focus on developing technologies to advance stem cell medicine. Asymmetrex is a member company of the Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute BioFabUSA (ARMI) and the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council (MassBio). Current R&D is supported by grants from NIH-NHLBI and ARMI.