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Stem Cell Treatment Developer Shifts From People to Animals

A Santa Ana-based stem cell company is changing its therapeutic direction from man to man’s best friend.

PrimeGen Biotech LLC established VetCell Therapeutics in late June to develop and commercialize stem cell treatments to be used in veterinary medicine.

VetCell is looking at treatments for dogs, cats and horses. It’s targeting diseases such as lameness in horses, degenerative joint disease, muscle degeneration, tendonitis, and chronic kidney disease in cats.

It is developing therapies by gathering stem cells from animal tissue samples, whether the animal’s own or a donor’s, and injecting them into the animal under treatment.

“VetCell is recently formed to translate our technology knowledge toward the veterinary stem cell opportunities. We have advanced technology that we would like to submit to trials,” Thomas Yuen, PrimeGen’s founder, chairman, and chief executive, said in an interview at PrimeGen and VetCell’s corporate office and research complex on Daimler Avenue in Santa Ana next to the Costa Mesa (55) Freeway.

PrimeGen and VetCell moved to Santa Ana from Irvine when VetCell’s creation was announced.

Yuen said it wants to have a clinical trial of its veterinary stem cell therapies completed by the end of 2016.

That would be followed by submission to the Food and Drug Administration’s animal and veterinary section for approval.

Yuen said it wasn’t a difficult transition to emphasize veterinary stem cell therapy.

“Physiologically, [humans] and animals have much in common. You need to use the general knowledge and do specific tests and further research with the different species,” he said.

“We were focused on the human side for a good 10 years. When we started to look at … the hurdle before one can commercialize a human stem cell therapy, we [decided that] maybe we could devote some of our time to looking at translating our knowledge for animal benefit,” Yuen said.

The company has relationships with animal hospitals that provides it with surgically removed source tissue for stem cell development.

Yuen mentioned that VetCell’s treatments could be used on race horses as an example of its potential market.

“When they run, they have a tendency of getting into an inflammatory situation. They get too tired or they get injured,” he said.

Yuen pointed out that the expense of owning and training race horses makes it justifiable to look at “a better method [than] traditional methods of healing. Stem cell has the promise of better healing and maybe fuller recovery.”

Others

VetCell isn’t by itself when it comes to veterinary stem cell therapy development. The field has existed for just over a decade. Others involved include San Diego-based Animal Cell Therapies Inc., Vet-Stem Biopharma in Poway, and Nicholasville, Ky.-based Medivet Biologics LLC.

University veterinary medicine departments have also offered stem cell therapies for animals, including the one at the University of California-Davis.

PrimeGen, which employs 10, decided to move its offices because of the company’s new direction. Its Santa Ana facility includes executive offices and several laboratories devoted to various aspects of stem cell research. It also includes a vivarium that would allow the housing of animals for testing and “is in the early, early stages of constructing a clean room,” said Tom Ramos, VetCell’s director of marketing and product development.

VetCell has been marketing itself to potential customers at trade shows, including the Pacific Veterinary Conference last month in Long Beach.

“[There was] quite a group of interested vets and also researchers from various universities that have veterinary medicine [programs]” that the company encountered during the show, Yuen said.

PrimeGen is still working on human projects, even with its current emphasis on veterinary stem cells.

“We are in discussions with practicing surgeons—they’re pushing us to consider human trials. So we have a variety of technologies that are suited for several kinds of chronic and aging situations,” Yuen said.

Diabetic and cosmetic wound healing and treating osteoarthritis are potential uses for PrimeGen’s human cells, he said.

Any trial would take a while to complete, said Yuen, who estimated that it would take up to six years before a human product would be ready for FDA consideration. He didn’t have a specific time estimate for veterinary stem cell approval but guessed it would be faster.

Yuen doesn’t have a medical background. He is best known as the former chief executive of Santa Ana-based audio technology company SRS Labs Inc. and cofounder of defunct Irvine PC maker AST Research.

“I am not [medically] trained, but I got so intrigued that I went on the [Web], even back then, looked up the anti-age, [Centers for Disease Control] website,” he said, explaining that the agency’s site includes a stem cell primer.

Yuen has said in earlier interviews that he started PrimeGen because of the potential of stem cells to help him with personal health challenges. He has chronic kidney disease and has been a dialysis patient for about 30 years. Yuen has said one of his daughters had her kidneys fail at 16.

“That’s why this whole area has been hypnotizing, whether human treatments or animal,” Yuen said.

PrimeGen was established in 2002, a couple of years before stem cell research gained buzz and California voters passed Proposition 71, a law enacted in 2004 to support such research in the state.

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