A group of scientists at the Cincinnati Children's Hospital has used separate lines of human induced pluripotent stem cells to create stomach organoids with a three-layered structure and gastric function such as smooth muscle contraction and glandular secretion. The team reported its results in the December 2021, issue of Cell Stem Cell.

Clade Therapeutics Inc., which launched with an $87 million series A round, may have what sounds like an ambitious goal: to create scalable, off-the-shelf stem cell-based medicines that can be as accessible to patients as antibody therapies are today. But the startup, backed by more than two decades of advances in the area of induced pluripotent stem cells, is within sight of developing a cell therapy to take into clinical testing.

DUBLIN – Treefrog Therapeutics SA closed a $75 million series B round this week, which will help to increase its reach and its profile, as it pursues its highly ambitious objective to drive the adoption of a new way of making induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) at scale. The Bordeaux, France-based firm is not a CDMO in any sense, however. It is a fully fledged biotech, with early stage iPSC-based programs in Parkinson’s disease, cardiovascular disease and bone marrow transplant, among others. It’s just that it is also attempting to revolutionize how those cells are cultivated before it administers them as therapies.

With a special interest in neurological disorders, Hopstem Biotechnology Co. Ltd. closed a series A++ round to raise nearly ¥100 million (US$15.5 million) to advance hNPC-01, an off-the-shelf induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC)-derived human forebrain neural progenitor cell product to treat chronic conditions caused by stroke and traumatic brain injuries.

Multiple companies are pursuing CD47-blockade as a tumor immunotherapy approach. Sana Biotechnology Inc., too, is interested in the therapeutic potential of CD47 – but from a very different angle. By overexpressing CD47 on stem cells, researchers at Sana want to make transplanted cells invisible to the immune system.

Sometimes, scientific progress comes from conceptual insights that arrive in a flash. More often, however, such progress arrives in a decidedly less glamorous, though no less important, manner – through the development of new technologies in what can be a very slow iterative cycle of getting a new method to work.

Japanese scientists led by Shin Kaneko, an associate professor in the Center for iPS Cell Research and Application at Kyoto University, have developed the first practical bioengineering strategy for generating a universal pluripotent stem cell.

Shoreline Biosciences Inc., a San Diego-based company developing allogenic natural killer and macrophage cellular therapies for cancer and other diseases, has raised $43 million in a financing led by Boxer Capital.