BioE Awarded Patent for Cell Separation Compositions Used to Obtain Company’s Category Defining Cord Blood Stem Cell

BioE^®, Inc., a biomedical company that provides enabling, high-quality cellular tools for drug discovery and therapeutic research, announced today the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) recently awarded it U.S. Patent 7,160,723. This patent - combined with related U.S. Patent 6,933,148 - protects the cell separation compositions for isolating BioE’s Multi-Lineage Progenitor Cell™ (MLPC™) stem cell.

“The issuance of our latest patent further protects the proprietary compositions and methods we developed to isolate potentially therapeutically important cells from blood tissues, including the MLPC stem cell from umbilical cord blood,” said Michael Haider, president and chief executive officer for BioE. “The MLPC has produced the first commercially available clonal stem cell lines in the new and increasingly recognized category of stem cells from nonembryonic, non-adult sources.”

The PrepaCyte^® Platform
BioE’s most recent patent expands the proprietary compositions employed by the company’s PrepaCyte cell separation platform. PrepaCyte is a liquid reagent used in cell processing to separate and collect potentially therapeutically relevant cells, such as stem cells and T-cells, from a variety of human blood sources including umbilical cord blood, peripheral blood and bone marrow. Importantly, the PrepaCyte platform is a non-particle-based separation medium that separates cells using negative selection.

BioE’s first cell separation product based on the PrepaCyte platform and developed using its patented compositions is PrepaCyte-CB. This sterile, closed bag system is designed specifically for processing and cryopreserving cord blood cells. BioE anticipates its cGMP-manufactured PrepaCyte-CB system will be available to the burgeoning cord blood banking industry in 2007.