FRANKFURT (Reuters) -Drugmaker Bayer said on Wednesday that initial testing on 12 volunteers showed its experimental stem cell therapy to treat Parkinson’s disease was well-tolerated and that transplanted cells survived in patients’ brains.
Bayer said the positive one-year results from subsidiary BlueRock Therapeutics’s Phase I trial of the therapy known as bemdaneprocel encouraged it to advance the testing on humans to the second of three stages.
For the experimental therapy, BlueRock researchers derived dopamine-producing nerve cells from pluripotent stem cells, which are early stage cells that can develop into any type of specialised tissue.
When surgically implanted into the brain of a person with Parkinson’s disease, the therapeutic cells are designed to restore neural networks destroyed by Parkinson’s disease.
Parkinson’s, for which there is no cure and which affects more than 10 million people worldwide, causes progressive cell damage in the brain and decreased dopamine levels.
Symptoms include loss of motor function, tremors, muscle rigidity and slowness of movement.
Under a push to build a cell and gene therapy business, Bayer acquired BlueRock Therapeutics and Asklepios Biopharmaceutical in 2019 and 2020, respectively.
Bayer last year struck a partnership deal with Mammoth Biosciences in the San Francisco Bay area, co-founded by Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna, to develop therapeutic tools based on CRISPR/CAS9 gene editing.
(Reporting by Ludwig BurgerEditing by Miranda Murray)
