KangStem Biotech said that it has signed a deal with Seoul National University’s R&DB Foundation to receive the university’s skin organoid manufacturing technology.
The technology uses a three-dimensional (3D) air-liquid interface (ALI) skin organoid preparation from human pluripotent stem cells for developing atopic dermatitis. The technology mimics the skin shape with the same flat-shape 3D structure as the real skin.
Organoids are organ analogs or mini-organs in 3D cell tissue capable of self-organization of functions and structures similar to actual organs.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) selected cerebral-organoid as one of the top 10 promising technologies in 2015. As a result, many pharmaceutical companies began considering organoids as an alternative to address the ethical issue of current animal testing.
Weill Medical College of Cornell University and researchers in Wuhan, China, have used lung and intestinal organoids to study Covid-19 and develop new drug candidates.
Although there have been no study results for a long time in the field of skin organoids, a research team of Koehler Laboratory at Boston Children’s Hospital published the study results on skin organoids for the first time in Nature in June 2020.
However, unlike the actual flat skin, the method used in the study had several limitations regarding drug screening or disease modeling.
According to KangStem Biotech, the recently acquired technology has a flat and 3D structure identical to real skin.
Through self-organization that occurs in the real-life, it reproduces a tissue with the same shape as the real skin with all appendages, including nerves, sweat glands, hair follicles, and sebaceous glands. The technology mimics skin shape differentiated from the existing artificial skin.
The company explained that it would develop an off-the-shelf graft material without transplant rejection when its pluripotent stem cell platform technology can be applied to the skin organoid technology.
“We plan to launch models for normal skin, atopic dermatitis, redness and erythema, and aging for evaluating the efficacy of new drug candidates by commercializing the drug screening platform technology,” KangStem Biotech R&D Global Center Director Lee Seung-hee said. “In the longer term, we will develop a skin graft with the same shape and function of real skin differentiated from the existing artificial skin, and a hair follicle graft material that can eliminate the inconvenience of hair follicle transplantation.”