Fate Therapeutics, Inc. announced today that the Company's iPSC technology platform, developed with Sheng Ding, Ph.D., has been honored as the Top Innovation of 2009 by The Scientist and has received the 2009 North American Technology Innovation Award from Frost & Sullivan. These notable awards recognize Fate Therapeutics for advancing minimally invasive techniques for the reprogramming and differentiation of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), including the protein-induced reprogramming technologies pioneered by Dr. Ding, associate professor at The Scripps Research Institute and a scientific founder of Fate Therapeutics. Earlier this year, under a research collaboration with Fate Therapeutics and The Scripps Research Institute, Dr. Ding and his team of scientists became the first group to accomplish the extraordinary feat of iPSC generation without genetic manipulation.
"We are honored to receive these recognitions of achievement and thankful for the contributions of our Scientific Founders," said Paul Grayson, president and CEO of Fate Therapeutics. "By building on their pioneering research, we are striving to create an industry admired stem cell biology drug discovery engine for the identification and development of small molecules and biologics to modulate cell fate for therapeutic benefit."
Fate Therapeutics utilizes the most advanced reprogramming and differentiation technologies for generating cell types of interest to elucidate disease biology and identify targets for therapeutic intervention. The Company's protein-based reprogramming platform in combination with its novel small molecule conditions offers a highly efficient, non-viral, non-DNA based method to recapitulate human physiology for commercial scale drug discovery and therapeutic use. The Company has exclusively in-licensed from The Scripps Research Institute and the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research an intellectual property portfolio related to iPSC technology, including filings that date back to November 2003. This portfolio includes the latest techniques published by Dr. Sheng Ding in October 2009, which use three small molecules to generate iPSCs in a manner that is 200 times more efficient than and twice as fast as conventional methods for reprogramming adult human cells.