VistaGen Receives Notice of Allowance for Canadian Patent Expanding Stem Cell Technology Platform
17-Jun-2014
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SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, CA – VistaGen Therapeutics, Inc., a biotechnology company applying pluripotent stem cell technology for drug rescue and regenerative medicine, announced in an official press release that the Canadian Intellectual Property Office has issued a Notice of Allowance for Canadian patent No. 2,684,022, entitled “Mesoderm and Definitive Endoderm Cell Populations.” This patent, which is licensed exclusively to VistaGen by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, will expand VistaGen’s intellectual property portfolio for pluripotent stem cell culture systems that produce human cells of the endoderm lineage, including liver, lung, pancreas, parathyroid and thyroid cells.
“This important Canadian patent allowance extends our core intellectual property protection in a market that has been strategically significant to us for many years,” stated Shawn K. Singh, JD, VistaGen’s chief executive officer. “In a manner similar to our recently announced Notice of Allowance for its counterpart, U.S. Patent Application 12/836,275, this new Canadian patent allowance and our world-class differentiation and assay formulation expertise put us in a strong position to pursue additional stem cell research projects in Canada, especially innovative projects involving liver biology, customized drug metabolism assays, and pilot nonclinical studies using pancreatic beta-islet cells for drug and regenerative cell therapies for diabetes.”
VistaGen, a stem cell company headquartered in South San Francisco, California, is focused on drug rescue and regenerative medicine. We believe better cells lead to better medicines™ and that the key to making better cells is precisely controlling the differentiation of human pluripotent stem cells, which are the building blocks of all cells of the human body. For over 15 years, our stem cell research and development teams and collaborators have developed proprietary methods for controlling the differentiation of human pluripotent stem cells and the production and maturation of numerous specific types of adult human cells. Our drug rescue activities are focused on combining our stem cell technology and assay development expertise with medicinal chemistry to generate Drug Rescue Variants™. These are novel, proprietary and safer chemical variants of once-promising small molecule drug candidates discovered and developed by pharmaceutical or biotechnology companies, the U.S. National Institutes of Health, or academic laboratories, which have positive efficacy data supporting their therapeutic and commercial potential, but have been discontinued due to unexpected heart or liver safety concerns.
With $8.8 million of grant funding awarded from the US National Institutes of Health, VistaGen has successfully completed Phase 1 development of AV-101, an orally available, non-sedating, small molecule prodrug candidate. AV-101 is aimed at the multi-billion dollar neurological disease and disorders market, including neuropathic pain, a serious and chronic condition causing pain after an injury or disease of the peripheral or central nervous system, epilepsy and depression and Parkinson’s disease. Our AV-101 IND application on file at the FDA covers clinical development for neuropathic pain.