Plasticell, the biotechnology company specialising in high throughput technologies for directed stem cell differentiation, has tied-up with Tokyo- based, Veritas Corporation as the exclusive distributor for all of its services and products, including CombiCult, in Japan.

CombiCult breaks the major bottleneck in stem cell research and development programmes – the discovery of optimised stem cell differentiation protocols. CombiCult also allows scientists to develop custom cell culture media (e.g. GMP compatible stem cell expansion media for cell therapy), create high value cell lines for toxicity testing in the pharmaceutical/cosmetic/nutrition industries, and to increase yield and/or decrease cost of bioprocess manufacturing.

Japan is one of the leading countries in stem cell research, especially in the field of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells). By making CombiCult more accessible to the Japanese research community through an active presence withVeritas Corp., Plasticell hopes to reduce the cost & risk while significantly accelerating the stem cell research effort in Japan.

“Plasticell has a unique and powerful platform that indeed breaks the bottleneck of stem cell research. With their high-throughput system, CombiCult, Plasticell is able to significantly reduce the cost of obtaining not just differentiation or expansion protocols, but optimized protocols. This also cuts many months, if not years, off a stem cell research programme, reducing risk and allowing researchers to contemplate working on challenging cell types. We hope to deploy this important technology widely in Japan,” commented Shinsaku Iida, president of Veritas Corp. in Tokyo.

Dennis Saw, CEO of Plasticell added, “Japan is a very important market for Plasticell and we are pleased to have engaged Veritas Corp., an established and respected biotech goods and services distributor in Japan.We are excited to make CombiCult more readily available to the Japanese stem cell research community, and are confident that CombiCult can be used as a tool to the advantage of Japanese stem cell science.”