Human cell lines for highly relevant bioassays

products-servicesEvercyte GmbH

August 25th 2014

Overview

Evercyte has developed a range of human hTERT immortalized cells lines that show characteristics similar to primary cells. Moreover, Evercyte establishes human induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells by mRNA transfection of urine-derived cells. These cells have been shown to differentiate towards several lineages of the three germ layers.

Evercyte thereby provides highly relevant cell lines from different tissues and donors with unlimited sourcing and availability. Cell-based assays established with these cells show increased reproducibility and can be standardized.

Besides offering cell lines and cell panels, Evercyte cooperates with customers in the development of novel cell lines and customer-tailored bioassays.

Features

Evercyte’s immortalized human cell lines show continuous growth while maintaining primary-like normal, non-transformed phenotypes. The cells express cell-type specific markers and functions and thus accurately represent the in vivo situation. Evercyte´s induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells can be derived from any consenting individual, are not afflicted with ethical conserns and allow the patient-specific generation of highly differentiated cell types for in vitro test systems as well as cell-based therapies.

Evercyte cell lines offer the following features:

Continuous growth and a phenotype similar to primary human cells
Unlimited cell source increasing the reproducibility of the performed bioassays
Due to their urinary origin, Evercytes iPS cells are easily available from healthy and diseased donors without any ethical concerns
Representative in vitro test systems can be established with standardizable, well-characterized cell models

Products

Human immortalized cell lines are offered in three principal product groups:

hTERT transduced human cell lines

Unlimited growth capacity and phenotype similar to the normal non-transduced counterpart cells (e.g. RPTEC/TERT1 highly differentiated renal proximal tubular epithelial cell lines, HUVEC/TERT2 highly differentiated umbilical vein endothelial cells and NHEK/SVTERT3 highly differentiated skin keratinocytes)
Derived from various human tissues (e.g. kidney, skin, endothelium) or urine
Sourced from different donors in order to take biological differences into account (e.g. cell panels fibroblasts, endothelial cells, exfoliated proximal tubular epithelial cells, melanocytes, keratinocytes, microvascular endothelial cells)
Sourced from donors with different health status, age, gender
Derivation of different cell types from one tissue biopsy (e.g. cells from human skin: melanocytes, keratinocytes, microvascular endothelial cells, mesenchymal stem cells, fibroblasts)

Human iPS cells:

Generated from urine-derived cells, which makes any consenting individual a potential donor, generation of iPS cells is not afflicted with ethical concerns and makes cell sourcing easy and harmless to the donor
Generated from cells from the urinary tract that have not been exposed to UV irradiation and thus might bear less mutations compared to e.g. skin fibroblasts
Unlimited growth capacity and the potential to differentiate into any cell type of the human body

Bioassays established with:

highly differentiated human cell lines
cell lines that can be grown indefinitely thereby facilitating high reproducibility of the observed results
cell lines sourced from different donors to take the genetic background into account

Examples: analysis of the neoangiogenic potential of novel drugs, toxicity studies (cellular viability, cell death), testing the tumorigenicity of test substances, etc.

Services

Evercyte offers the following services:

Establishment of customer tailored cell lines and bioassays (CRO-based services)
Establishment of continuously growing cell lines from specific tissues (sourcing of tissues with ethical approval, primary cell culture, immortalization, characterization of cellular phenotype, sub cloning)
Establishment of reporter cell lines (inducible reporter cell lines)
Establishment of knock-out / knock-in cell lines with specific phenotype
Establishment of bioassays that answer specific customer questions
Generation of induced pluripotent stem cells from healthy or diseased donors
Generation of highly differentiated cell types from iPS cell lines
Establishment of protocols for the differentiation of iPS cells lines towards different lineages

Advantages

In summary, Evercyte products show several advantages over conventionally used cell systems such as primary cells and tumor cells:

Evercyte cell lines are continuously growing and highly differentiated with a phenotype that resembles that of primary cells; the cells show an optimal balance between cellular growth and differentiation
Evercyte cell lines accurately represent the in vivo situation
Evercyte cell lines can be grown indefinitely and thus increase the reproducibility of the observed results
Evercyte cell lines can be generated from different donors and thus donor specific differences are taken into account

Technology and ethics

Evercyte co-founders Regina and Johannes Grillari have 15 years of experience in cell and molecular biology, documented in more than 100 SCI publications. They also possess eight patents.

Evercyte generates cell lines based on the following technologies:

Human somatic cells and adult stem cells are life span extended by introduction of the catalytic subunit of human telomerase (hTERT), based on in-licensed patents from Geron Corp.
The reprogramming of human urine derived cells is based on a technology that has been developed in cooperation with Guangzhou Institute of Biomedicine and health (GIBH), Chinese Academy of Sciences, China. The integration-free reprogramming using mRNA transfections, is in-licensed from Fraunhofer Gesellschaft.

All studies performed at Evercyte GmbH are in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki in being approved by the local ethical commission and with donors giving their informed consent.