UCSF and the Cell Technologies, part of  GE Healthcare Life Sciences, have entered into a collaboration to start a cord blood project.

Using a discovery grant awarded by the University of California’s Office of the President, along with matching funds from GE Healthcare, a group of scientists led by Dr Andrew Leavitt, medical director,  UCSF Adult Blood and Marrow Transplant Laboratory have begun a three-year project.

The UCSF/GE Healthcare collaboration will focus on cord blood, which has some key advantages for transplants. It is  loaded with the stem and progenitor cells that make all the other cells in the blood system – including white cells, red cells and platelets. It can be collected easily without causing pain or risk to the donor. Further,  cord blood does not need to match the tissue type of the patient receiving it as closely as bone marrow does.

The objective of the $840,000, three-year project is to make better use of a rich source of routinely discarded stem cells from  umbilical cord blood. The project plans to track chemical compounds that could be added to the stem cells and progenitor cells in cord blood to increase their population. If the process works, the number of cells transplanted should be large enough to replace the patient’s diseased blood system with a healthy one. It is intended to overcome the  lack of blood-forming stem cells available to patients suffering from life-threatening diseases such as lymphoma, myeloma, leukaemia or sickle cell anaemia.

GE Healthcare is funding the project as part of its efforts  to develop technologies to  support the emerging era of regenerative medicine, said Dr. Stephen Minger, global head,  research & development,  Cell Technologies at GE Healthcare.

During the first year, UCSF scientists led by Dr Michelle Arkin, , associate director, Small Molecule Discovery Center, will use ultra-fast, robotic technology to screen 120,000 chemicals searching for those that may trigger the expansion of stem cells. A high-tech automated microscope provided by GE, the IN Cell 2000, will help the team narrow those down to a few that look like potential candidates.

In the project’s second year, the scientists hope to test the best candidates to see the outcome when  mixed with blood cells in the lab or in animals. Later, ‘GE’s Cell Factory’ product will be utilized to produce large quantities of cells for further testing. By the end of the project, the team hopes to have promising compounds moving toward clinical trials, he added.

In recent years, a growing number of patients have received cord-blood transplants which has worked well for paediatric cases. But  for most adult patients, cord blood simply doesn’t provide a large enough number of stem cells, said Dr Leavitt.

 “If this succeeds it will be incredibly important as the  clinical potential of being able to expand haematopoietic stem cells in cord blood is huge. If this works, we would  have discovered something that the world desperately needs,” said Dr Minger.