BioTime And XenneX Form LifeMap Sciences, Inc. To Create Roadmap For Regenerative Medicine

BioTime, Inc. (NYSE Amex: BTX), a biotechnology company that develops and markets products in the field of stem cells and regenerative medicine, today announced it has formed LifeMap Sciences, Inc., in collaboration with XenneX, Inc. LifeMap Sciences will develop and commercialize a database of the thousands of cell lineages branching from embryonic stem cells, and their molecular markers. LifeMap Sciences plans to make certain aspects of the database available for use by stem cell researchers at pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies and other institutions through paid subscriptions or on a fee-per-use basis. The database will permit users to follow the development of embryonic stem cell lines to the purified progenitor cell lines created by BioTime using its proprietary ACTCellerate ^TM technology.

Background

Regenerative medicine refers to the development and use of therapies based on human embryonic stem (hES) cell or induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cell technology. The great scientific and public interest in regenerative medicine lies in the potential of hES and iPS cells to become all of the cell types of the human body. Many scientists therefore believe that hES and iPS cells have considerable potential as sources of new cell replacement therapies for a host of currently incurable diseases such as diabetes, Parkinson's disease, heart failure, arthritis, muscular dystrophy, spinal cord injury, macular degeneration, hearing loss, liver failure, and many other disorders where cells and tissues become dysfunctional and need to be replaced.

The complexity of cell types obtainable from hES and iPS cells presents a challenge in the development of cell replacement therapies. Human therapeutic products require a high degree of purity to meet the hurdles of regulatory approval. BioTime's ACTCellerate™ technology was invented as a means of generating over 140 diverse human progenitor cell types from hES or iPS cells in a scalable and highly purified state. These diverse cell lines have applications in basic laboratory research and are being marketed for that purpose. In addition, many of the ACTCellerate cell lines may have important human therapeutic applications. Because the complexity of human development is mirrored by the complexity of cell types arising from hES and iPS cells, there is a great need for a database to aid researchers in selecting the progenitor cell lines that are most likely to develop into tissues usable in cell replacement therapies.