Engineered pancreatic endocrine cells that report beta cell toxicity for use in high throughput screening applications

Project Summary Abstract The prevalence of diabetes in the United States and world wide is increasing dramatically and new drugs that can protect or restore the function of insulin producing pancreatic beta cells are urgently needed For decades drug discovery efforts in this space have been hampered by the lack of consistent and abundant human beta cells for drug screening The advent of beta cells derived from induced pluripotent stem cells iPSC as pioneered by Regenerative Medical Solutions RMS has opened an era of making readily available beta cells a reality for performing high throughput screening HTS of compound libraries Considerable market research including direct customer feedback has indicated that HTS applications remain expensive and laborious when conducting screening assays of compound libraries to detect insulin which currently rely upon antibody based methods such as immunofluorescence microscopy and enzyme linked immunosorbent assays ELISA To further enhance the efficiency of screening thousands of compound libraries for diabetes drug discovery RMS will engineer iPSC lines for use in HTS assays Such engineered beta cell products will express a luciferase green fluorescent protein fusion under the control of the human insulin promoter This fusion protein which can be detected by inexpensive and easily automated assays will enable iPSC derived beta cells packaged in RMS HTS product platforms to be a truly accurate efficient and cost effective tool in high throughput drug screening applications Direct customer feedback has led to this proposal and addresses their specific utility requirements for performing HTS applications Project Narrative New drugs to treat diabetes are urgently needed but the tests that companies use to develop drugs are very expensive and in many cases prohibitive Regenerative Medical Solutions will address this need by developing a first of a kind specially engineered beta cell product that will enable drug companies to more rapidly screen their compound libraries and thus identify candidate compounds for diabetes drug discovery more efficiently and accurately than ever before