In its end of year letter to shareholders, AgeX Therapeutics sees a bright future for the Longevity market.
Longevity.Technology: The days when aging was considered natural and inevitable are long gone. Now it’s a disease to be treated like any other. Investor interest is growing, putting pioneering companies in a perfect position to enjoy rapid and sustained growth.
AgeX Therapeutics, which pioneers cell therapy and tissue regeneration, took the opportunity to reflect on a busy year, which has seen it move into a new facility in San Francisco Bay, add to its board of directors, and start work on pluripotent stem cell lines with its immunotolerance UniverCyte technology.
As covered previously by Longevity.Technology, UniverCyte takes the company a step closer to the the goal of universal allogenic cells. The allogenic approach uses donor cells, rather than the patient’s own, and is superior in every way, but faces a substantial challenge in the rejection of cells from the host immune system.
Hypoimmunogenic/universal cells evade the body’s natural immune system and so can be given to patients without immunosuppressant drugs. AgeX feels that these technologies could have a transformative impact on the entire industry.
“We believe this gives us a strong competitive edge over other companies struggling with transplant rejection,” states the letter. “In the coming year, we plan to create a UniverCyte-modified pluripotent stem cell cGMP master cell bank, from which we could potentially derive any human cell type for our in-house product development programs or to provide cells to third party pharma companies to pursue other products.” [1]
The company’s position was strengthened by securing a patent for a method of generating induced pluripotent stem cells. These cells have been reprogrammed to retrace their developmental age and to regain the ability to form all of the young cells and tissue types in the body.
It’s another advance in what appears to be a rapidly evolving Longevity market, with a host of novel services hitting the market addressing the issue of human aging. Aging is, as AgeX CEO Dr Michael West told us, “almost certainly the greatest medical mystery we have ever faced,” and there is a huge amount of work being done to open up new avenues.
Going forward, one of the most promising of these, says AgeX, is partial cellular reprogramming. The company feels this opens up an entirely new field of pioneering therapeutics. It’s a revolution AgeX is banking on with partial cellular technology and other innovations.
Source: Google: Market Summary: AgeX Therapeutics Inc. NYSEAMERICAN: AGEA quick look at the company’s stock price over the last 12 months echoes the comments made by Dr Aubrey de Grey in a recent interview. “The science in the anti-aging world is ready now, but the [public] investor sentiment doesn’t necessarily feel that yet.”
AgeX is in a confident place. It’s bringing to market ground breaking developments which address some of the key challenges facing the age tech marketplace. With interest growing, the company believes it is ideally placed to benefit from growing investor focus on the issues of Longevity and aging.
