Published Study Documents Biologic Potential Of Cellular Compositions From Harvest Technologies' BMAC System(TM)

Main Category: Pharma Industry / Biotech Industry
Article Date: 09 Apr 2008 - 4:00 PDT

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Harvest Technologies Corp. announced the publication of results from a study designed to document the biologic potential of cellular compositions derived from its Harvest BMAC System. The study appears in the peer-reviewed scientific journal, Cell Transplantation (Heeschen et al, Vol. 16, pp 1059-1069), under the title, "Concentration of Bone Marrow Total Nucleated Cells by a Point-of-Care Device Provides a High Yield and Preserves Their Functional Activity".

There has been considerable excitement generated concerning the potential of bone marrow cells to be effective in regenerating damaged tissue; however, it is important to demonstrate that the method for isolating these cells does not impair their regenerative potential. Harvest Technologies undertook this study to certify that its method of concentrating bone marrow cells does not change their functional ability.

"The results of this study are important because not all bone marrow cell compositions are the same," said the study's principal investigator, Pr. Christopher Heeschen, Dept. of Surgery, Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich, Germany. "In our experience, different methods used to process bone marrow cells can lead to different cell compositions, and those different cell compositions can have different clinical effects. Therefore, we believe that before a new method of processing bone marrow is used in a clinical study, it must be evaluated to document its biologic potential."

"We believe this is the first time that the cell composition of a simple point-of-care system has been compared to the cell composition prepared by the recognized gold standard, the Ficoll method, in a rigorous study whose results were then published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal," said Gary Tureski, President of Harvest Technologies. "A rigorous and independent study of point-of-care compositions that have been evaluated for their biologic potential is obligatory, if not mandatory. The Heeschen study demonstrates that the Harvest BMAC System is, in fact, capable of producing a bone marrow cell composition that is equal to, and may in fact be clinically superior to, the cell composition prepared by the gold standard."

Until now, it has been difficult to process and concentrate a clinically significant dose of adult stem cells from a patient's bone marrow at the point of care. The Harvest Technologies BMAC System is the world's first technology that produces clinically significant amounts of stem and precursor cells from a small aspirate of autologous bone marrow in just 15 minutes.

Harvest Technologies is a privately held company based in Plymouth, Mass.

Harvest Technologies Corp.