CHA University Professor Lim Dae-seog and his life science-bio engineering team have transferred its technology on Parkinson’s disease treatment using dendritic cells to Pharos Vaccine, a cell therapy developer.
Under the accord, Pharos Vaccine will pay 1 billion won ($843,000) to the CHA University’s Industry-University Cooperation Foundation and the CHA University Bundang Hospital. In addition, the company plans to enter clinical trials through joint research in the U.S. and China, the university said in a press release Tuesday.
Also, using immune-tolerant dendritic cells, the CHA University Bundang Hospital and Pharos Vaccine team aims to treat various inflammatory immune diseases and intractable diseases, including diabetes, which have no specific treatments.
Dendritic cells are important messenger cells that can direct immune cells in the body.
When manufactured for immunity enhancement, it can apply to cancer patients, and when manufactured to show immune tolerance, it can apply to inflammatory diseases, autoimmune diseases, and Parkinson’s disease. However, researchers have regarded dendritic cells exhibiting immune tolerance as ambiguous and difficult to identify.
The team could identify the cell through this study, which revealed that the protein marker Clec5a is specifically highly expressed in immune-tolerant dendritic cells.
The research team expects that dendritic cells, which exhibit immune tolerance, will lead to a fundamental treatment of Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative brain disease.
“As the aging population increases, research on degenerative brain diseases becomes more important,” Professor Lim said. “Research on the treatment of Parkinson’s disease using immune-tolerant dendritic cells is unprecedented in the world.”
Lim added that it would be a breakthrough in Parkinson’s disease treatment research, for which there is no suitable cure.
In addition to research on Parkinson’s disease treatment using immune-tolerant dendritic cells, the research team has also treated acute myocardial infarction, myocarditis, a rare intractable disease, and rheumatoid arthritis, a representative autoimmune disease.
The study results were published in the latest issue of Circulation.
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