VistaGen Therapeutics, Inc. and NuPotential Receive National Institutes of Health (NIH) Grant to Develop Safer Approaches for Producing Patient-Specific Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells

(BUSINESS WIRE)--VistaGen Therapeutics, Inc. and NuPotential, Inc. today announced that the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded to the companies a grant of approximately $500,000 to accelerate development of novel and safer approaches to generate patient-specific induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells for regenerative medicine, drug discovery and drug rescue. VistaGen’s versatile Human Clinical Trials in a Test Tube™ platform involves the use of integrated stem cell technologies and validation processes associated with the function and utility of pluripotent stem cells to produce human heart, liver, pancreas and blood cells. NuPotential’s innovative cell programming technology involves the use of proprietary small molecule-based cell reprogramming processes for generating patient-specific iPS cells instead of commonly-used retroviruses or cancer-inducing oncogenes.