Geron Corporation announced that the U.S. Patent Office has issued U.S. patent No. 6,200,806, with claims directed to human embryonic stem cells.

The patent is part of the embryonic stem cell intellectual property portfolio licensed to Geron by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF).

"This patent includes claims to preparations of human embryonic stem cells and methods of isolating them. It further strengthens Geron's proprietary position in human embryonic stem cells," noted David J. Earp, Geron's vice president of intellectual property. "Our patent portfolio includes issued U.S. patents for primate and human embryonic stem (ES) cells and human embryonic germ (EG) cells, as well as over 50 patent applications pending around the world covering many aspects of human embryonic stem cell culture, production, differentiation and uses in cellular reprogramming."

"Geron pioneered the field of human pluripotent stem cells a number of years ago when we funded and collaborated with the university researchers who first successfully isolated human ES and EG cells," said Thomas B. Okarma, Geron's president and chief executive officer. "We have since made substantial progress in developing scalable methods for growing the undifferentiated cells and can now produce populations of several differentiated cell types including hepatocytes, cardiomyocytes, and a number of neural cell types, including dopaminergic neurons. The scope of our patent coverage for these cells is commensurately broad, extending from the basic undifferentiated human embryonic stem cells, through techniques required to optimize cell production, to the differentiated cell populations that we manufacture from them.

Geron's human embryonic stem cell technology allows for the highly controlled manufacturing of purified, well-characterized, fully functional human cells that can be subjected to rigorous in vitro and in vivo testing in much the same way as a drug or a biological. Geron's approach differs completely from, for example, the recently published study in the March 8, 2001, issue of the New England Journal of Medicine which described the use of uncharacterized, heterogeneous, pooled brain tissue extracted from human embryo fragments and injected into the brains of patients with Parkinson's disease.

Human ES and EG cells offer important commercial advantages as sources for the production of multiple differentiated cell types for widespread applications in medicine. Using proprietary techniques developed by Geron, the human ES cells can be grown in bulk quantities, without the need for feeder cells, and they can be genetically modified to introduce genes that render them even more useful for therapeutic and research applications.

"For example," noted Dr. Okarma, "we can introduce our proprietary telomerase gene into the cells, which, when expressed in the differentiating cells produced from the human ES cells, will allow for prolonged proliferation. This will make the scaled manufacturing of therapeutic cells commercially feasible."