California Stem Cell, Inc. (CSC) has completed an internal study demonstrating that the company’s proprietary immunotherapy manufacturing process can be applied to multiple cancer types. Originally developed for late stage metastatic melanoma, the platform tissue culture technology has also been shown to work with tumour tissues from hepatocellular carcinoma, ovarian cancer, glioblastoma multiforme, and other solid tumour cancers.

The unique principle supporting CSC’s cancer immunotherapeutic approach is purification of tumour stem cells isolated from a patient’s own tumour tissue, to use as an antigenic source. While prior companies’ processes typically took months and often yielded unreliable or unusable materials, CSC has standardized its platform technology for reproducibility, resulting in optimized high cell yields, and efficient and scalable manufacturing.

The company’s proprietary stem cell culturing technologies, performed under cGMP conditions, have resulted in a consistent production time of less than eight weeks, with a 100 per cent success rate in generating lines with potential applicability to a broad range of cancer types.

“Such significant improvements in the manufacturing time and success rate are critical when working with late stage cancers that typically have a short window for treatment,” said Gabriel Nistor, MD, CSC vice president of research and development. “The improvements allowed us to test our proprietary manufacturing methods on a broader range of devastating cancer types, with encouraging results.”

CSC recently submitted a phase III protocol to the US Food and Drug Administration to explore efficacy of its cancer stem cell-based treatment for recurrent stage III and stage IV melanoma. The company is also completing a phase I clinical study in liver cancer, and preparing to submit a phase II clinical study in ovarian cancer.

California Stem Cell Inc. (CSC) is focused on the development of stem cell-based therapies for metastatic cancers, spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s Disease).