SAN DIEGO - Fate Therapeutics Inc., a biopharmaceutical company dedicated to the development of programmed cellular immunotherapies for cancer and immune disorders, announced today in a press release that the US Patent and Trademark Office issued US Patent No. 9,382,515 covering preparations of human induced pluripotent cells. This newly-issued patent adds to the significant intellectual property portfolio of over 60 issued patents and 90 pending applications, which are owned or exclusively licensed by Fate Therapeutics, covering compositions and methods critical for deriving, engineering, maintaining and differentiating induced pluripotent cells.

The compositions protected by the patent cover induced pluripotent cells that do not contain a polynucleotide encoding c-MYC. The MYC family of transcription factors are proto-oncogenes implicated in tumor growth. The expression of c-MYC was previously considered to be indispensable for the generation of human induced pluripotent cells.

"We believe that human pluripotent-derived cell therapy products will be highly disruptive, and the elimination of oncogenes in pluripotency induction is critical to ensure clinical safety," said Scott Wolchko, President and Chief Executive Officer of Fate Therapeutics. "Additionally, intellectual property covering compositions of isolated induced pluripotent cells is foundational to any therapeutic strategy seeking to engineer and bank renewable pluripotent cell lines for use in manufacturing off-the-shelf cell products."

With a comprehensive intellectual property portfolio and nearly a decade of research and development expertise in pluripotent cell biology, Fate Therapeutics is advancing a disruptive cancer immunotherapy platform to efficiently derive homogeneous populations of effector cells, including NK-cells and T-cells. The Company uses its proprietary pluripotent cell platform to generate precisely-engineered pluripotent cell lines, which possess the unique dual properties of unlimited self-renewal and differentiation potential into all cell types of the body. Through small molecule-guided differentiation, these engineered pluripotent cell lines enable manufacture of off-the-shelf immune cells with enhanced effector properties, such as persistence, tumor targeting, resistance to tumor suppression and histocompatibility.

The US patent is owned by the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and licensed exclusively to Fate Therapeutics for all therapeutic purposes. The first named inventor of the patent is Rudolf Jaenisch, M.D., a scientific founder of Fate Therapeutics. Dr. Jaenisch is a Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a founding member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He recognized the potential safety concern of c-MYC overexpression and reactivation, and demonstrated that human somatic cells can be reprogrammed to a pluripotent state in its absence.