At this year's Annual Meeting of the International Society for Cell & Gene Therapy of Cancer (ISCGT), held September 2 - 4 in Cork, Ireland, the best poster prize was awarded to an intriguing study in which chicken antibodies were developed for applications in the repair of tissue damage and for potential use in the therapy of cancer metastasis.
The wining abstract, presented to Mr. Tyrone Bowes, a graduate student at REMEDI (Regenerative Medicine Institute) based at the National University of Ireland in Galway states: "We have generated a panel of high affinity scFv antibodies, using chicken immune phage display REMEDI (technology, that bind to the primary cilium of a quiescent population of lineage –ve CD45 +ve Mesenchymal Stem cells (MSC) that reside in human bone marrow. This MSC subset can be readily isolated using Miltenyi MACs system, expanded rapidly in culture and differentiated into bone, cartilage and fat tissue, and are therefore of particular interest in regenerative cell therapy". The group is currently aiming to produce stable functional antibodies for the isolation of MSCs for regenerative cell therapy, and to demonstrate the anti-metastatic potential of humanized antibodies in antibody dependent cellular cytotoxicity (ADCC) assays. This ground breaking study was lead by Professors Timothy O'Brien (Director) and Frank Barry (Scientific Director) of REMEDI.
Presenting the award on behalf of the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine, Professor Farzin Farzaneh (European Editor of Experimental Biology and Medicine), pointed out the therapeutic potential of the technology developed by the group at REMEDI. The panel of Judges commended Mr. Bowes for his significant contribution, at such an early stage in his research career, to the isolation of high affinity antibodies that are targeted to specific molecules on the surface of tumor and multi-potential adult stem cells.
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