BioTime, Inc., a biotechnology company focused on regenerative medicine and blood plasma volume expanders, and its subsidiary LifeMap Sciences have launched LifeMap BioReagents (http://bioreagents.lifemapsc.com/), a new portal offering researchers access to BioTime’s research product lines including PureStem human progenitor cell lines, PureStem packages, clinical and research grade human embryonic stem cell lines (hES), HyStem hydrogels, culture media, and cell differentiation kits.

LifeMap Sciences will be the principle marketing and sales arm for BioTime’s cell-based products and related reagents for the research community in academia, research hospitals, and biotech and pharma companies. LifeMap Sciences holds the exclusive, worldwide license to market GeneCards (www.genecards.org), with over 12 million page visits per year from hundreds of thousands of unique users worldwide, and MalaCards (www.malacards.org), and plans to launch LifeMap Discovery, its database for biomedical and stem cell research, later this quarter.

LifeMap BioReagents is integrated with the GeneCards, MalaCards, and LifeMap Discovery databases, thereby providing a large number of biomedical researchers accessing these databases a means of identifying stem cell reagents that can enhance research and discovery efforts in a variety of fields, including stem cell research, developmental biology, mechanisms of various human diseases, drug discovery and therapeutic discovery and development.

“There has been growing interest in the PureStem and hES cell lines,” stated Yaron Guan-Golan, Head of Marketing at LifeMap Sciences. “Our ability to provide stable, characterized, pure, and scalable cell lines to the research community and to industry is a big step forward—not only in the study of stem cells, but also in the understanding of cellular and developmental biology and human disease, and in the discovery of new therapies. Together with our LifeMap Discovery database, researchers will now be able to immediately obtain access to cutting-edge embryonic stem and progenitor cell lines as part of a wealth of developmental and stem cell information that they need for research.”

LifeMap Sciences’ core technology and business is based on its integrated database suite, the discovery platform for biomedical and stem cell research. This platform includes GeneCards, the leading human gene database; LifeMap Discovery, the database of embryonic development, stem cell research, and regenerative medicine; and MalaCards, the human disease database. LifeMap Sciences also markets PanDaTox, an innovative, recently developed, searchable database that can aid in the discovery of new antibiotics and biotechnologically beneficial products.