A grow­ing group of biotech star­tups look­ing to ad­vance a line­up of po­ten­tial stem cell cures for Type 1 di­a­betes can look to a big and very ef­fec­tive ri­val mov­ing for­ward in the field.

Mads Krogs­gaard Thom­sen

No­vo Nordisk says it’s been mak­ing ma­jor progress on de­vel­op­ing the em­bry­on­ic stem cell lines it needs for a world-class man­u­fac­tur­ing op­er­a­tion. And No­vo adds that they’ve al­so been mov­ing for­ward in de­vel­op­ing a new en­cap­su­la­tion de­vice to guard their stem cell ther­a­py from a de­struc­tive im­mune re­sponse — all part of the Holy Grail for de­vel­op­ing a cure for the dis­ease.

No­vo is still some years away from de­fin­i­tive hu­man stud­ies, but their pre­clin­i­cal progress will be­come a stan­dard bear­er for one of sev­er­al se­ri­ous ef­forts to find a cure for di­a­betes. Eli Lil­ly re­cent­ly part­nered with Sig­ilon on its pur­suit of a stem cell cure. Then there’s Sem­ma, out of the lab of Har­vard’s Doug Melton, which raised $114 mil­lion for its ap­proach to cre­at­ing in­sulin pro­duc­ing be­ta cells.

Stem cell ther­a­pies have been up — and they’ve been down. But this new ac­tiv­i­ty among big and lit­tle com­pa­nies in re­gen­er­a­tive med­i­cine un­der­scores the grow­ing be­lief that new tech­nol­o­gy re­lat­ed to man­u­fac­tur­ing and de­liv­ery can over­come some big chal­lenges that sep­a­rat­ed the ear­ly hype from the re­al­i­ty of de­vel­op­ing a cure. As they move for­ward, you can bet that Sanofi and oth­er gi­ants will pay close at­ten­tion.

No­vo, one of the most fo­cused R&D play­ers in the world, says its progress on di­a­betes in­spired the com­pa­ny to broad­en its stem cell pipeline to in­clude pro­grams for Parkin­son’s, work­ing with the Swedish biotech com­pa­ny Bi­o­lam­i­na and Lund Uni­ver­si­ty. And Bi­o­lam­i­na is al­so col­lab­o­rat­ing with Duke (Sin­ga­pore) and No­vo on chron­ic heart fail­ure and age-re­lat­ed mac­u­lar de­gen­er­a­tion. More are on the way.

“Our col­lab­o­ra­tion with UCSF is al­so ex­pect­ed to ac­cel­er­ate cur­rent and fu­ture part­ner­ships to de­vel­op stem cell-based ther­a­pies for treat­ment of oth­er se­ri­ous chron­ic dis­eases,” said Mads Krogs­gaard Thom­sen, ex­ec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent and chief sci­ence of­fi­cer of No­vo Nordisk.