Australian biotech Stem Cell Sciences has signed an exclusive agreement with Italy's San Raffaele Scientific Institute to develop novel human muscle stem cells for drug discovery and toxicology applications.

These muscle stem cells, a subset of pericytes (cells located around the circumference of small blood vessels), can be extracted from skeletal or heart muscle and retain the capacity to turn into muscle cells on demand. The cells were discovered by Professor Giulio Cossu and his team at the San Raffaele.

Cossu is renowned for his work on the physiopathology of foetal skeletal muscle development and his team's work on muscular dystrophy is being keenly watched. The Italian team is experimenting with a range of gene therapies for Duchenne muscular dystrophy by studying Golden retriever muscular dystrophy (GRMD), the canine equivalent.

The pericyte stem cell lines are another addition to SCS's list of cell types, which include embryonic, neural and adipose stem cell sources. Last month, SCS was named as the program lead in an EU-funded multinational drug screening collaboration called NEUROscreen, which will use SCS's neural stem cell technology.

SCS announced the San Raffaele deal at the AusBiotech conference yesterday. The company said it will initially conduct in-house technology development of the pericytes at its Cambridge, UK, automated cell production facility. Once cost-effective muscle cell production is confirmed, the technology will be made available to the pharmaceutical industry via a range of commercial options, including assay-ready formats or under license for in-house use.

In its embryonic stem cell work, SCS announced in June that it had signed an exclusive in-licensing deal with Professor Yoshiki Sasai's team at the RIKEN Centre for Developmental Biology in Japan, which has discovered a way to block apoptosis in human ES cells.

This deal involves using Rho-associated kinases (ROCK) inhibitors to block the onset of apoptosis, a key challenge in the effective scale-up of stem cell technologies.

SCS has released this inhibitor under the brand name PassAID, to be used in conjunction with the company's HEScGRO animal-serum free medium, available through distributor Millipore.