StartCell

Purpose and goal:

The main goal of StartCell is to dramatically decrease the route and cost of high quality, clinically relevant and commercially available induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) as starting material for derivation of cell therapies with a potential to cure currently incurable diseases, like diabetes, parkinson’s disease, macular degeneration, stroke. All work packages in StartCell have the goal of decreasing cost and time by addressing very different challenges.

Expected results and effects:

The expected effects of StartCell will be i) novel and sustainable technologies for upscaling iPSC culture and for quality controlling iPSC, ii) novel ways to define and calculate the cost of these cell therapies iii) roadmap for how to not enter commerciallisation dead ends iv) documents and SOPs v) innovations within the space of StartCell vi) communications, policy-making and education within ATMP in general and specifically in iPSC derived cell therapies, vii) StartCell will be the place to go to for partnering and questions, viii) Facilitate applications to international grants

Approach and implementation:

To reach the goals of StartCell technology development is needed to: i) scale-up and introduce free-floating culturing, ii) develop minimal requirement cell culture media and matrices, iii) create novel quality controls using machine learning, and iv) replace costly, unethical, and labour intense animal testing with AI-models. StartCell will focus on all these issues by targeting, fine-tuning and optimizing a multitude of tasks to create synergy and together approach our goals.