VSTA About Us We have developed a versatile stem cell technology platform based on the controlled differentiation of human pluripotent stem cells into mature, non-transformed, cells which can then be used to create bioassay systems for predictive toxicology, drug discovery, drug rescue and cell therapy.
We believe our stem cell technology platform, Human Clinical Trials in a Test Tube™, can provide a clinically relevant indication, or prediction, of how humans will respond to new drug candidates early in the drug development process, long before they are ever tested in humans.
A major challenge in the current drug development process is that conventional animal and in vitro testing can, at best, only approximate human biology. A pharmaceutical company can spend tens of millions of dollars to discover, optimize and validate the potential efficacy of a promising lead drug candidate and advance it through preclinical development, only to see it fail due to unexpected heart or liver toxicity. The pharmaceutical company then often discontinues the development program for the once promising drug candidate and it is simply put not the shelf despite positive data indicating its potential therapeutic and commercial benefits. As a result, the pharmaceutical company’s significant prior investment may be lost.
We are focused on breaking down a fundamental barrier to move efficient development of new drug candidates. By meeting the significant need for predictive toxicology bioassay systems that more closely approximate human biology at the front end of the drug development process, we believe pharmaceutical companies can recapture substantial value from their prior investment in once promising drug candidates that have been put on the shelf due to heart or liver toxicity concerns.
Our goal is to leverage our stem cell technology to build a diverse pipeline of new, proprietary drug rescue variants which are as effective as the once promising drug candidates but without the toxicity that caused them to be put on the shelf. Focusing on discontinued drug candidates with positive efficacy data may give us a valuable head start in our efforts to identify and develop new, proprietary drug rescue variants faster and less expensively than drug candidates discovered and developed using only conventional animal and in vitro call culture testing. This integrated stem cell platform will allow us to create, together with our medicinal chemistry collaborators, new, safer, proprietary chemical variants of once promising new drug candidates that have been discontinued in development due to toxicity concerns. Drug rescue variants that retain the efficacy of the original drug candidate, but with reduced toxicity, will be the focus of our drug rescue programs.