NYSCF, Q-State partner to advance precision medicine for nervous system disorders

The New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF) and Q-State Biosciences (Q-State) are partnering in a joint research collaboration to advance patient care for nervous system disorders through precision medicine. Through this collaboration, both organizations will further advance their respective technologies, while exploring how their proprietary research platforms might provide synergies in the process of developing novel therapeutics and companion diagnostics.

Employing its recently reported pioneering technology, The NYSCF Global Stem Cell ArrayTM, NYSCF will further expand its expertise in automated reprogramming by rapidly producing high quality, stem cell lines. Q-State will utilize its all-optical electrophysiology platform and these stem cell lines for precision medicine research. This collaboration will mark the first time induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cell lines will be made from patient blood samples in a robotic, massively parallel capacity.

"Working in tandem with Q-State's outstanding scientific leadership and technology creates an opportunity for the kind of profound, game-changing innovation which has always been a priority for NYSCF," NYSCF CEO and co-founder, Susan L. Solomon noted. "This is a pioneering opportunity to use blood, the most accessible way to look at patients' cells, on a large scale to generate personalized stem cell lines in the laboratory."

"Q-State's mission is to harness advances in stem cell and optical technologies in order to improve both the study of neural-physiology as well as the development of treatments for nervous system disorders. We feel that examination of disease relevant cell-types made from patient-specific stem cells represents an important step in the ever evolving process of drug discovery and have identified this collaboration with NYSCF and their automated iPS cell derivation technology as an opportunity to ruggedize our internal development pipeline," said David Margulies, Founder and Board Chairman of Q-State. "The reprogramming approaches they have recently invented place NYSCF at the forefront of this important field and we are excited to enter into this partnership."

Q-State Scientific Co-Founders, Dr. Kevin Eggan and Dr. Adam Cohen added, "While we have seen that the optical approaches for measuring neuronal changes in electrical activity mediated by disease and drug effects developed by Q-State have proven very effective for overpowering many forms of experimental noise, we have identified functional variation between manually derived iPS cell lines as a key remaining concern. We believe this collaboration with NYSCF will help to further increase Q-State's ability to resolve the influence of a patient's genetic make-up in our diagnostic and drug discovery assays."

With this agreement, NYSCF and Q-State affirm their commitment to patients awaiting cures. The capabilities provided by The NYSCF Array should enable Q-State's research to proceed at a streamlined pace, with higher rigor and less variability. Through this collaboration, NYSCF and Q-State aspire to make the production of stem cells, the study of disease and the testing of drug candidates possible with only a few drops of a patients' blood.

Source: New York Stem Cell Foundation