5 February 2020 - - US-based biotechnology company AgeX Therapeutics, Inc. (NYSE American: AGE) has forged a research collaboration with the University of California, Irvine using AgeX's PureStem technology to derive neural stem cells, with the goal of developing cellular therapies to treat neurological disorders and diseases for which there are no cures, the company said.

The collaboration's initial R and D work, expected to take approximately one year, will be conducted in the UCI laboratory of Leslie Thompson, PhD, Chancellor's Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior and Neurobiology and Behavior, a researcher in the field of Huntington's disease and other neurological disorders, under a Sponsored Research Agreement handled by the Industry Sponsored Research team at UCI Beall Applied Innovation.

The initial focus will be on Huntington's disease, while other potential targets may include Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and stroke.

The primary goal of the research will be to develop a robust method of deriving neural stem cells from pluripotent stem cells in sufficient quantity and with sufficient purity and identity for use in cell-based therapy.

Professor Thompson's laboratory has already accumulated safety and efficacy animal data that may support an IND submission to the FDA as early as 2021 for the commencement of clinical trials to treat Huntington's disease.

The collaboration includes an opportunity for AgeX to organize a company to be jointly owned with Professor Thompson and other researchers to pursue clinical development and commercialisation of cell therapies derived using licensed inventions arising from the research programme, as well as certain patent pending technology for neural stem cell derivation, and certain technical data, including animal data, to support IND submissions.

AgeX Therapeutics 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.