Cell Technologies, a division of GE Healthcare, is now looking at India to expand its presence here with a range of novel cellular technologies. These are IN Cell Analyzer used for High Content Analysis (HCA) an automated process to extract and analyse data from live cells images, high resolution and super resolution microscopy technologies with detailed cellular images.
The company also has the AXP AutoXpress Platform licensed from ThermoGenesis to harvest stem cells from patients own fat tissue, bone marrow or umbilical cord.
As part of its growth strategy, GE Healthcare is now keen on India to market its analyzers to the pharma industry in a bid to help speed up the screening of drug compounds to assess its safety standards. This would enable Indian drug researcher companies to reduce the cost of failure, stated Dr. Stephen Minger, global head of research and development, Cell Technologies, GE Healthcare Life Sciences at a media briefing here.
“When a compound goes through rigorous pre clinical analyses fails in phase III clinical trials, the investment lost is over $1 billion. Pharma industry cannot afford another Vioxx that was pulled out of the market to cost Merck $4 billion. This is where instrumentation for high throughput screening is a boon for researchers,” he added.
Researchers carrying out liver toxicity assays need to perform them on human liver cells. In case of scientists doing cardiotoxcity studies need to work with human cardiomycocytes. This is where in a global exclusive license with Geron Corporation, the company developed human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) for use in drug discovery and toxicity screening. The GE Healthcare Cell Factory with Geron’s hESC technology allowed generation of large scale supply of hESC-derived cells with normal cellular function. It introduced its first product ‘Cytiva’ cardiomyocytes or human heart muscle cells for predictive toxicity testing.
Dr Minger who is now in India has been making efforts to change the antiquated methods based on animal cells or human cell lines and create an awareness about the range of automated technologies to profile drug candidates, cellular imaging in bio-medical research and cell therapy systems. “Without the introduction of game-changing technology, we cannot expect improvement in R&D productivity or in the discovery for more effective therapies,” he said.
According to Dr Minger embryonic stem cells are a powerful research tools for better predictability. Having been able to receive one of the first UK licenses for the derivation of hESCs, he generated the first human embryonic stem-cell line in UK. “Years of research on cell based therapy shows that this holds a bright future and could develop into a new business model for pharma industry and hospitals. Although India is still nascent in the field of stem cell research, companies in the space, need to look at advanced harvesting systems,” he added.
Highlighting opportunity for harvest of stem cell from cord blood going by the birth rates in India, Dr Minger said the technologies for cell therapy could bring automation and precision to cord blood processing.
In order to capitalize the growing birth rates, Lalith Kishore, business leader, research products, life sciences, GE Healthcare called for the need to create public cord blood banks in government medical centres through public private partnerships to set up facilities was being looked into.
The Cell Technology research and manufacturing facilities are at Cardiff Wales, Umea and Uppsala in Sweden and Piscataway, New Jersey. These centres work closely with the GE’s global research centres in Bangalore and New York. The R&D team comprises 150 scientists which includes representation from India. In fact, the software for the high content analysis was developed from Bangalore.