Grant: Collaborative Health Research Projects (NSERC partnered)

Emerging cellular therapies have the potential to both greatly improve the health of individuals and to reduce healthcare costs by curing diseases. For example, it has been established that a cellular transplant therapy can reverse and potentially cure type 1 diabetes. However, there are far too few cadaveric donors available relative to the many thousands of Canadians who could benefit from this therapy. Generating pancreatic islets (insulin-generating cells) from cultured stem cells is an exciting development that could provide an essentially unlimited supply for transplantation into diabetic patients. It has already been demonstrated that these cells can reverse diabetes in animal models, and a human clinical trial is currently underway. However, several challenges must be overcome to make this cure for diabetes a reality. Among them, improving the complex processes used to produce these cells is paramount. For example, we need technologies capable of non-invasively (and without contact) monitoring of the cultures so that the cells produced remain safe and effective. Our group has shown that novel spectroscopic techniques can gather critical information using light scattered by the cultured cells, tracking the critical developmental changes taking place as stem cells become pancreatic cells. This project will advance this non-invasive technology so that it can be used to assess and control the quality of stem cell-derived therapeutic cells destined for transplantation. This will contribute to the development and approval of safe and efficacious therapies with the potential of curing thousands of Canadians. While the first application will target diabetes, our technology could also be applied to many other cell therapies that target diseases such as cancer and heart disease cellular therapy.