Invention

Long-term culture associated changes need to be considered for quality control of cell preparations. The invention discloses a simple method to track cellular aging based on continuous DNA-methylation changes at six specific CpG sites. This epigenetic signature can be used as a biomarker for various cell types to predict the state of cellular aging with regard to the number of passages or days of in vitro culture.

Commercial Opportunities

Cross-contaminated and misidentified cell lines are a major problem in cell biology. In analogy, cross-contamination or mixing up of donor samples are also problematic for primary cells. Quality control is even more important for cellular therapy – the use of early passages is usually recommended due to less functional changes and less accumulation of mutations. Scientists of the RWTH Aachen developed a simple epigenetic test to track cellular aging. The method does not require a reference-sample of the corresponding early passage and provides a simple quality control to determine the state of cellular aging.As induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) do not reveal cellular aging and are predicted passage zero, the identification of high quality induced iPS might also be possible.On behalf of RWTH Aachen, PROvendis offers access to rights for commercial use as well as the opportunity for further co-development.

Benefits

• Determination of the biological age of cells in culture
• Simple by using standard techniques
• Reproducibility of cell culture experiments
• Identification of high quality induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) might be possible
• Quality parameter of cells for tissue engineering
• Cross-contamination might be detected

Current Status

In case of interest we are pleased to inform you about the current patent status. 

About PROvendis GmbH

PROvendis offers companies certified and patented innovations from North Rhine-Westphalian universities. The core function of the enterprise is to market patentable and commercially exploitable inventions. PROvendis GmbH was founded in 2001. Since January of 2002, PROvendis has been the service provider for the universities of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Within the scope of the BMBF commercialization campaign, the Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) supports the activities of PROvendis.