ViaCyte’s approach seeks to address the hurdles of donor islet transplants
Decades of clinical data with donor islet transplants indicate that beta cell replacement approaches may offer curative benefit to patients with type 1 diabetes. While donor islet transplants can be highly effective, they are not widely available because of a severe lack of suitable donor organs and the requirement for immune suppression.
To overcome these hurdles, ViaCyte has pioneered the approach of carefully and fully differentiating pluripotent stem cells into pancreatic islet precursor cells (PEC-01 cells) and delivering them to patients. Since PEC-01 cells are made from a pluripotent stem cell line (CyT49), there is a potentially unlimited supply available for manufacturing ViaCyte’s product candidates.
At ViaCyte, our mission is to profoundly improve the lives of people with type 1 diabetes. To accomplish that, we have become leaders and pioneers in many areas, breaking new ground in stem cell research and medical device engineering, and developing brand new methods of cell therapy scaling and manufacturing.