Roche and Oxford University are leading an effort that brings together ten pharmaceutical companies and 23 academic institutions to launch Stembancc, which will focus on generating 1,500 induced pluripotent stem cell lines for use in drug development.

Stembancc, coordinated by Roche and managed by Oxford University, aims to use human induced pluripotent stem cells to develop human disease models that can be used to test drugs in development.

“The aim of Stembancc is to generate and characterize 1,500 high-quality human induced pluripotent stem cell lines derived from 500 patients that can be used by researchers to study a range of diseases, including diabetes and dementia,” says Martin Graf, coordinator of the project at Roche. “The cell lines will help implement patient models that will facilitate the drug development process thanks to the possibility of reproducing the disease mechanism in vitro.”

Induced pluripotent stem cells are derived from ordinary adult cells that are reprogrammed to create stem cells that can be used to generate any kind of cell. The groundbreaking work in this field earned a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2012 for John Gurdon of Cambridge University and Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University.

IPS cells can be differentiated into a variety of cell lines that can be used for a broad range of in vitro tests in research and early stage drug development. Because the iPS cell lines are derived directly from real patients, they include the genes that may be implicated in diseases of interest. The cell lines in Stembancc will also be developed from samples that have been obtained from accurately screened and defined groups of patients, thus providing a solid database with numerous patients and accurate data on their disease to enable better insight into the disease mechanisms.

Roche scientists have already been working with partners at Harvard University, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Boston Children’s Hospital to create over 100 human induced pluripotent stem cell lines that can be used to model cardiovascular and neurological diseases. But because it takes up to six months to convert an adult’s skin cells into iPS cells, more collaborators were needed to collect all 1,500 samples.

The Stembancc project will focus on peripheral nervous system disorders, especially pain; dementias; neurodysfunctional diseases such as migraine, autism, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder; and diabetes. The project will also investigate the use of human iPS cells for identifying drug targets and biomarkers, screening potential drug treatments, and toxicology testing.

Drugmakers involved in the collaborative effort include Roche, Pfizer, Sanofi, Abbott Laboratories, Boehringer Ingelheim, Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, Merck KGaA, Novo Nordisk, and Orion Oyj. The partnership plans to spend $72.7 million (€55.6 million) to create the iPS cell bank. The European Union’s Innovative Medicines Initiative is contributing (€26 million), the European pharmaceutical trade group EFPIA is contributing (€21 million), and the rest is coming from the companies and academic institutions.

Stembancc is one of seven projects just announced by the Innovative Medicines Initiative that aim to tackle some of the biggest challenges in drug development. The Innovative Medicines Initiative is the world’s largest public-private partnership in health, a coordinated program of the European Union and the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations, each of which has contributed $1.3 billion (€1 billion) to the support collaborative research projects. The other recently announced projects include data integration and management, “green” drug development, and drug delivery and behavior in the body.