Washington, D.C. (PRWEB) September 16, 2014

New Organ, a collective initiative for regenerative medicine, announced today the initial six teams competing for the New Organ Liver Prize, a global prize competition sponsored by the Methuselah Foundation, a biomedical charity. The prize challenge will award $1,000,000 to the first team that creates a regenerative or bioengineered solution that enables a large animal to live 90 days without native liver function.

Initial teams represent scientists from Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, Northwick Park Institute for Medical Research, University College of London, University of Florida, University of Oxford, University of Pittsburgh, and Yokohama City University. Additional teams are under review and will be announced in the future.

New Organ Founder and Methuselah CEO David Gobel: We are gratified to see the initial interest in the Liver Prize. We are doing this because of the millions who need new organs. Organ disease, and the associated organ shortage, represents one of the greatest medical challenges that can be solved. A scientific foundation has been built over the last 15 years to pursue the vision of organs on demand. Its time for a significant societal commitment to that vision.

The prize teams are led by:

Dr. Tahera Ansari (Team Hepavive): Pursuing the decell-recell approach to bioengineering a liver. Dr. Stephen Badylak (Team Badylak): A pioneer in biologic scaffolds using extracellular matrix. Dr. Eric Lagasse (Team Ectogenesis): Grew mini-livers inside the lymph nodes of mice with liver disease. Dr. Bryon Petersen (Team Petersen): An authority on the role of hepatic stem cells in liver pathology. Dr. Takanori Takebe (Team Organ Creative): Created tiny liver buds that grew and functioned in mice. Dr. Basak Uygun (Team HepaTx): First to report proof-of-principle transplantation of engineered liver grafts.

Representing distinguished leaders within regenerative medicine, the Founding Fellows of the Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine International Society (TERMIS) remarked: We strongly and enthusiastically endorse New Organ. Regenerative medicine has made significant advances in the past 15 years and the New Organ Liver Prize represents a golden opportunity for the next leap forward. The public and the medical community will realize a remarkable clinical benefit with the availability of off the shelf whole livers obviating the need for donor organs, and the medical health care system will simultaneously benefit. We hope this forward-looking effort sets the standard that inspires other initiatives to focus all the resources of regenerative medicine on solving major health care challenges.

About New Organ:

New Organ is a collective initiative tackling organ disease by building a prize portfolio and global alliance of partners committed to advancing breakthroughs in bioengineering, banking, and regenerating vital organs, starting with the liver. It is designed to be a collaborative network of government, industry, and philanthropic organizations working together for the benefit of society. In December 2013, the New Organ Liver Prize was launched at the World Stem Cell Summit with $1 million in initial funding from the Methuselah Foundation. Learn more at http://neworgan.org.

About Methuselah Foundation:

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Six Teams to Compete for New Organ Liver Prize

PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:

16-Sep-2014

Contact: Dov Smith dovs@savion.huji.ac.il 972-258-82844 The Hebrew University of Jerusalem @HebrewU

Researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have developed a new cocktail that is highly effective at coaxing adult cells to become quality pluripotent stem cells.

Regenerative medicine is a new and expanding area that aims to replace lost or damaged cells, tissues or organs through cellular transplantation. Because stem cells derived from human embryos can trigger ethical concerns, a good solution is reprogramming adult cells back to an embryo-like state using a combination of reprogramming factors.

The resulting cells, called induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), could be used to replace those lost to damage or disease. However, scientists have discovered that the process of reprogramming adult cells can introduce genetic abnormalities that limit the cells' usefulness in research and medicine.

To make iPSCs, scientists expose adult cells to a cocktail of genes that are active in embryonic stem cells. iPSCs can then be coaxed to differentiate into other cell types such as nerve or muscle. However, the standard combination of factors used to reprogram cells leads to a high percentage of serious genomic aberrations in the resulting cells. (The reprogramming factors are Oct4, Sox2, Klf4, and Myc known collectively as OSKM).

Now researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have developed a new cocktail of reprogramming factors that produce high-quality iPSCs. Dr. Yosef Buganim, at the Institute for Medical Research Israel-Canada in the Hebrew University's Faculty of Medicine, worked with scientists at the lab of Whitehead Institute founding member Rudolf Jaenisch, a professor of biology at MIT.

The researchers reasoned that changing the reprogramming factors could reprogram the adult cells in a more controlled way and yield high-quality iPSCs. Working with mouse cells, Dr. Buganim and research scientist Styliani Markoulaki used bioinformatic analysis to design a new cocktail of reprogramming factors (Sall4, Nanog, Esrrb, and Lin28, known collectively as SNEL).

Their results showed that the interaction between reprogramming factors plays a crucial role in determining the quantity and quality of resulting iPSCs and that a different combination of reprogramming factors can in fact produce a much higher quality product.

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Scientists create therapy-grade stem cells using new cocktail to reprogram adult cells