Which Came First, Stem Cell or the Egg?

Applied Genetics News,  August, 2000  

• E-mail
• Print
• Link

Origen Therapeutics, Inc. (651 Gateway Blvd., No. 980, S. San Francisco, CA 94080-7025; Tel: 650/827-0200) has received a phase I SBIR grant from the National Institutes of Health. The grant is designed to support research and development aimed at accessing very early-stage, less differentiated chicken embryos for the establishment of chicken embryonic stem cell cultures. The grant provides approximately $100,000 to the company over a 6 month period. The principal investigator for the grant is Marie Cecile Van de Lavoir, senior scientist at Origen.

Early stage ES cells are totipotent; that is, they have the capacity to differentiate into any other cell type, making them potentially useful for the large-scale replication of desirable avian lines, as well as the genetic engineering of poultry. When injected into recipient embryos, the ES cells can contribute to both somatic tissues and the germ-line of the resulting chimeric chick. Thus, desirable traits can potentially be reproduced on a commercial scale, either by repeating the ES injection process into many recipient embryos or through the conventional breeding of birds whose new genetic traits have become stably incorporated into their germline.

Origen currently employs long-term cultures of ES cells obtained from stage X chicken embryos. Theoretically, stable lines of ES cells can also be derived from younger stage V-IX embryos might facilitate the formation of germline chimeras, as the stage V-IX ES cells could potentially be less differentiated than ES cell lines derived from stage X embryos. To date, however, the theoretical advantage of younger embryos has not been tested. The SBIR funding provides the opportunity to rigorously test the assumption that less differentiated embryos from stage V to IX embryos are candidates for the derivation of a useful ES cell line.

"Successful development of these methods could provide applications for the large-scale replication of desirable chicken strains for the poultry and egg industry," says Robert Etches, vice president of research at Origen. "Moreover, they could open new opportunities to employ transgenic technology for the development and production of novel protein therapeutics in eggs."

COPYRIGHT 2000 Business Communications Company, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group