StemCells, Inc. granted U.S. patent covering composition of neural stem cells derived from any tissue source

StemCells, Inc. announced today that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued U.S. Patent Number 7,361,505 with broad claims covering human neural stem cells derived from any tissue source, including embryonic, fetal, juvenile, or adult tissue. The ‘505 patent is exclusively licensed to StemCells.

“The issuance of this patent rounds out and strengthens our neural stem cell portfolio, which we believe is unparalleled in its breadth, depth and completeness,” said Martin McGlynn, President and CEO of StemCells, Inc. “We are confident that any third party wishing to commercialize neural stem cells as potential therapeutics or to use them as drug screening tools will have to seek a license from us irrespective of how they derive the cells. We have already granted licenses to several companies and are currently considering licensing others.”

StemCells, Inc., including its wholly-owned subsidiary, StemCells California, Inc., owns or has exclusive rights to more than 50 issued or allowed U.S. patents and more than 150 granted or allowed non-U.S. patents. Most of these have application to the selection, expansion or use of neural stem cells, and include claims which cover compositions of matter, methods of identifying, isolating and enriching neural stem and progenitor cell populations, and methods of using these cells for therapeutic applications as well as for drug discovery and screening. The Company has patent protection for the manufacture and use of its HuCNS-SC human neural stem cells through to the year 2024, even without relying on patent term extensions. Some of the Company’s other composition of matter patents, such as U.S. Patent Number 7,153,686 claim certain populations of enriched HuCNS-SC cells discovered by StemCells scientists. The Company has granted licenses to a number of companies in the neural stem cell field for limited purposes, including the U.S.-based BioWhittaker, Inc. (now part of the Swiss-based Lonza Group), UK-based ReNeuron Group plc, and Canadian-based Stem Cell Therapeutics Corp. and StemCell Technologies.

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