Telomerase immortalized neural progenitor cells

Patent Number: 7,150,989

Telemerase is critical for maintain telomere length and preventing senescence once cells have reached the Hayflick limit. This patent teaches the use of transfection with telomerase reverse transcriptase in order to generate neural progenitors that are immortal.

The patent covers a wide variety of neural progenitors and sources of neural progenitors, including, dopaminergic, cholinergic, and virtually all known sources of such progenitors that are published.

The disadvantage of therapy with such cells, of course, is the possibility of cancerous transformation. It has to be stated, however, that actually cancer derived neural cells have previously been used in clinical trials .

However, besides therapeutic uses, this patent may be highly valuable for generation of cell lines for in vitro testing of pharmaceuticals. This may be particularly of interest since companies like Cellutions that make it a business model to sell various neural derived cell lines to researchers.

View this patent on the USPTO website.