31 January 2020 - - US-based biotechnology company AgeX Therapeutics, Inc. (NYSE American: AGE) has forged a research collaboration with a Japanese biopharma company utilising AgeX's HLA-G-based immunotolerance UniverCyte technology platform for the engineering of hypoimmunogenic (universal) cells, the company said.

The research programme will evaluate the expression of UniverCyte on induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) and the ability of those UniverCyte-modified iPS cells to evade immune responses and to differentiate into somatic cells.

AgeX will have rights to use any improvements to its UniverCyte technology developed through the research and may negotiate commercial licensing arrangements granting its collaborator rights to use UniverCyte to produce cellular products for therapeutic and commercial purposes.

This is AgeX's first collaboration under its new technology licensing and collaboration business strategy. AgeX hopes to announce further collaborations for research and product development utilizing its technology platforms in the coming months.

AgeX's UniverCyte uses a proprietary, novel, modified form of HLA-G and is intended to permit donor cells to be transplanted into patients without donor-patient tissue matching and without administering immunosuppressant medication.

Immunosuppressive drugs can reduce patient resistance to infectious diseases and cancers as well as cause organ and other toxicities.

Reducing or eliminating the need for immunosuppressants after cell transplantation by use of hypoimmunogenic cells may make therapies universally available.

AgeX and its largest stockholder, Juvenescence, recently published a joint paper in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Regenerative Medicine highlighting the UniverCyte technology platform, "Engineering strategies for generating hypoimmunogenic cells with high clinical and commercial value," which has been very well received by the scientific community, ranking in the top 1% of more than 14m research papers tracked by Altmetric.

AgeX Therapeutics, Inc. (NYSE American: AGE) is focused on developing and commercializing innovative therapeutics for human aging.

Its PureStem and UniverCyte manufacturing and immunotolerance technologies are designed to work together to generate highly-defined, universal, allogeneic, off-the-shelf pluripotent stem cell-derived young cells of any type for application in a variety of diseases with a high unmet medical need.

AgeX has two preclinical cell therapy programmes, AGEX-VASC1 (vascular progenitor cells) for tissue ischemia and AGEX-BAT1 (brown fat cells) for Type II diabetes.

AgeX's revolutionary longevity platform induced Tissue Regeneration aims to unlock cellular immortality and regenerative capacity to reverse age-related changes within tissues.

AGEX-iTR1547 is an iTR-based formulation in preclinical development. HyStem is AgeX's delivery technology to stably engraft PureStem cell therapies in the body.

AgeX is developing its core product pipeline for use in the clinic to extend human healthspan and is seeking opportunities to establish licensing and collaboration agreements around its broad IP estate and proprietary technology platforms.