Summary:
STEMCO Biomedical, Inc. is a biotechnology company founded in 1999 and based in one of the world’s most prolific biotechnology regions, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. The company was founded by world-class researchers at the Duke University Comprehensive Cancer Center and Stem Cell Transplant Program. These researchers developed STEMCO’s core technology over several years of studied research and active participation in transplanting stem cells into cancer patients.
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Description (Web site quote):
STEMCO is currently developing a series of proprietary products that have applications in the preparation of hematopoietic stem and progenitor cell (HSP) grafts for adjunctive cancer therapy. STEMCO’s platform technology is based on the measurement of aldehyde dehydrogenase (ALDH), an intra-cellular enzyme that is highly expressed in HSPs. The first product, ALDEFLUOR™, released in February 2003, allow researchers to identify HSPs by virtue of their high expression of ALDH. Ensuing products will include ALDECOUNT™, a system for enumerating HSPs prior to transplant, and ALDESORT™, a product that will permit stem cell laboratories to purify HSP populations for transplant by flow sorting.

The association between HSPs and ALDH activity was first established in the late 1980’s when a group of oncologists at Johns Hopkins University that included Dr. Michael Colvin, one of STEMCO’s Founders, noticed that HSPs were much more resistant than tumor cells to the toxic effects of alkylating agents used to purge bone marrow grafts prior to transplantation. Subsequent studies established that ALDH in the HSPs oxidized the intracellular aldehyde form of the anticancer drug, converting it to a non-toxic metabolite. Cancer cells, which do not express high levels of ALDH, could not detoxify the drug and were therefore killed by concentrations of the alkylating agents that spared HSPs. The Hopkins group realized that this provided a basis to distinguish between HSPs and tumor cells in purging applications, thus setting the stage for ALDESORT. This group also designed a first generation of fluorescent ALDH substrates for use with flow cytometers and cell sorters to identify, enumerate, and sort HSPs. Flow sorted, small stem cells with high ALDH activity were shown to have the characteristics of primitive, multipotential blood stem cells that could establish durable, long term engraftment. The technology that STEMCO has embodied in ALDEFLUOR, ALDECOUNT, and ALDESORT emerged from research done subsequently at Duke University to create a new generation of ALDH substrates for flow cytometric analysis of HSP populations.
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