Fate Therapeutics Secures Foundational Patent for iPS Cell Reprogramming

SAN DIEGO, Dec. 9, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Fate Therapeutics, Inc. announced today that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has granted a patent covering compositions that are broadly utilized throughout the field of induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) technology.  U.S. Patent No. 8,071,369, entitled "Compositions for Reprogramming Somatic Cells," claims a composition comprising a somatic cell having an exogenous nucleic acid that encodes an Oct4 protein introduced into the cell.  The invention by Rudolf Jaenisch, M.D., founding member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and scientific founder of Fate Therapeutics, represents the second patent granted under U.S. Patent Application Number 10/997,146, which has a priority date of November 26, 2003.  Fate Therapeutics holds an exclusive license to the patent for pharmaceutical applications, including for drug discovery and validation, disease modeling, and therapeutic purposes.

"This issuance further validates the groundbreaking contributions of Dr. Jaenisch to the field of cellular reprogramming," said Dr. John Mendlein, a founder of Fate Therapeutics.  "His pioneering discoveries created a revolution in stem cell research, and major academic, research and commercial laboratories throughout the world are now aggressively working to unlock the therapeutic potential of iPSC technology for the benefit of patients."

In his 2003 U.S. patent application, Dr. Jaenisch first described the generation of human pluripotent cells from somatic cells, and how reprogrammed human cells might enable autologous cell therapy including for the treatment of neurological diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's or ALS.  The application is the first to describe key compositions, broad methods and key agents to reprogram human somatic cells to a pluripotent state.  Because reprogrammed human cells have been shown to behave similarly to embryonic stem cells with respect to their ability to differentiate into various cell types, reprogrammed human cells hold significant promise for the creation of human disease-specific models for drug screening and for the development of stem cell based therapeutics.

About Fate Therapeutics, Inc.

Fate Therapeutics is an innovative biotechnology company developing novel stem cell modulators (SCMs), biologic or small molecule compounds that guide cell fate, to treat patients with very few therapeutic options.  Fate Therapeutics' lead clinical program, ProHema, consists of pharmacologically-enhanced hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs), designed to improve HSC support during the normal course of a stem cell transplant for the treatment of patients with hematologic malignancies.  The Company is also advancing a robust pipeline of human recombinant proteins, each with novel mechanisms of action, for skeletal muscle, beta-islet cell, and post-ischemic tissue regeneration.   Fate Therapeutics also applies its award-winning, proprietary induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) technology to offer a highly efficient platform to recapitulate human physiology for commercial scale drug discovery and therapeutic use.  Fate Therapeutics is headquartered in San Diego, CA, with a subsidiary in Ottawa, Canada.  For more information, please visit www.fatetherapeutics.com.

SOURCE Fate Therapeutics, Inc.

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