Automated System for High Yield Pancreatic Islet Isolation

Project Summary Abstract This project aims to develop an automated system for reproducible high yield pancreatic islet isolation to greatly improve islet transplantation and benefit patients who suffer type I diabetes T D The new system will use state of the art technologies CG Scientific s patent pending automated cell isolation platform ACIP and its proprietary no islet left behind NILB process to replace the nearly year old Ricordi apparatus and achieve high islet recovery viability function and reproducibility The automated system will enable standardized islet isolation and facilitate islet isolation at local laboratories to drastically reduce the damaging cold ischemic time thereby providing islets of higher quantity and quality These improvements will potentially allow many donor pancreata which would otherwise be disqualified due to poor quality to be used for islet transplantation thereby significantly reducing the cost of islet transplantation and potentially enabling single donor islet transplantation to become a standard therapy In collaboration with Dr Harlan former Head of the Diabetes Branch at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases NIDDK and Drs Greiner and Bortell the original developers of the gold standard diabetic NRG Akita mouse model CG Scientific has demonstrated that its technologies can potentially increase islet recovery by x Phase I of this project specifically aims to develop a scaled up prototype device for automated islet isolation benchmark against current standards demonstrate its superior performance and validate the ex vivo and in vivo functions of the isolated islets using porcine pancreata as the model system The successful completion of this project will result in the commercialization of a standardized automated and high yield islet isolation system the first modern islet isolation system that accelerates diabetes research and standardizes single donor islet transplantation thereby benefiting the million people in the United States and the over million people worldwide who suffer T D Project Narrative We aim to develop an automated high yield pancreatic islet isolation system to greatly improve the efficacy of islet transplantation The successful completion of this project will result in the commercialization of the first modern islet isolation system which will provide large quantities of high quality islets from single pancreata thereby standardizing single donor islet transplantation and benefiting the million people in the United States and the over million people worldwide who suffer type I diabetes