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Yuen’s Latest Venture is Personal: Stem Cells

The face behind one of Orange County’s few stem cell startups is a familiar one: computer entrepreneur Thomas Yuen.

The move into biotechnology isn’t a stretch for Yuen, best known as chief executive of Santa Ana audio technology company SRS Labs Inc. and as a cofounder of defunct Irvine PC maker AST Research.

“This is really related to the fact that I am myself a longtime, chronic patient,” Yuen said. “I am a dialysis patient for the last 20-some years.”

Yuen has kidney disease and gets dialysis at his home three times a week.

“My particular illness is a hereditary one, and my offspring are prone to have that problem,” Yuen said.

One of his daughters had her kidneys fail when she was 16,the trigger that led to Yuen’s involvement with Irvine’s PrimeGen Biotech LLC.

Yuen is chief executive and principal investor at PrimeGen. The company’s PrimeCell Therapeutics LLC unit is using adult stem cells to regenerate several parts of the body, including heart tissue and kidney and pancreas cells.

“I stumbled into this new topic of stem cells about four years ago,” Yuen said.

PrimeGen was started in 2002, a few years before stem cell research gained buzz and California voters passed Proposition 71 in 2004 to fund research.

The company works with adult stem cells that come from a type of cell found in human gonads called the “germ line.”

“What we do is basically reboot them, using a computer term,” said Francisco Silva, PrimeCell’s vice president of research and development.

Rebooting cells, Silva said, allows them to transform into any type of cell that’s found in the human body. That could help fight disease after transplanting the cells into a patient.

One of PrimeGen’s goals: create regenerative stem cells that are based on a patient’s specific DNA. That would cut the body’s natural rejection response and the need to use drugs that suppress the immune system, said Silva, who came to the company from the Beckman Institute at the City of Hope Medical Center in Duarte.

PrimeGen’s use of adult cells, rather than embryonic cells, has kept it clear of ethical questions that have arisen around stem cells.

The cells PrimeGen uses have similar qualities and don’t “require the creation or the destruction of an embryo,” Yuen said.

PrimeGen, which has 30 workers, operates out of a 28,000-square-foot facility that includes laboratories and a cell culture clean room.

Yuen said his role at the company isn’t a heavily operational one. He described himself as “more of a primarily strategic person for them in the sense of the business side.”

“I don’t have a medical background or a biotech background,” Yuen said. “My background is all in the electronic, computer industry. My primary role is to assist them in the financing and also business development as it progresses.”

Yuen and “good friend” John Tu, cofounder of Fountain Valley-based computer memory products maker Kingston Technology Co., are PrimeGen’s primary financial backers, Yuen said.

“We might have spent close to $10 million” on PrimeGen during its four-year history, Yuen said.

The company got its start after Yuen said he met molecular biologist and inventor Chauncey Sayre, who is president and chief scientific officer for PrimeCell.

“It got me interested,” Yuen said. “I teamed up with him (to) find out what’s going on.”

PrimeGen might seek outside investors “to help broaden the capabilities of the company,” Yuen said.

It could have stem cells ready for market in about 18 months or so, he said.

“It is moving at a lot faster pace than most of us in the U.S. realize,” Yuen said of his PrimeGen’s research.

The company has ties to the University of California, Irvine, said Yuen, a 1974 graduate of the school. He said he’s in contact with Susan Bryant, UC Irvine’s dean of biological sciences, as well as Peter Donovan and Hans Keirstead, interim co-directors of the university’s Stem Cell Research Center.

PrimeCell is one of a small group of stem cell businesses in OC, an area that’s better known as a center of medical devices.

Another is Novocell Inc., an Irvine company using embryonic stem cells to find a diabetes treatment that landed $20 million in financing from a group led by Johnson & Johnson Development Corp., Johnson & Johnson’s venture capital arm.

The other player is California Stem Cell Inc., also of Irvine.

Yuen said he wasn’t aware of any specific company that was doing exactly the same thing that PrimeGen was doing.

His other job is running SRS Labs, which licenses audio and voice technology that improves the sound of home stereos, DVD players, computers and other consumer electronics.

In 1984, Yuen helped start computer maker AST (he was the “T” in AST). The company grew into a Fortune 500 company and a top PC maker before spiraling down in the 1990s. Yuen, AST’s longtime chief operating officer, left in 1992 in a dispute with his cofounders.

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