Asterias

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(650) 433-2900

230 Constitution Drive, Menlo Park, CA 94025

Asterias Biotherapeutics is a development stage biotechnology company focusing in regenerative medicine. We are developing therapeutics based on two different platform technologies: pluripotent stem cells and dendritic cell cancer immunotherapy. Near term, we are leveraging these platforms to develop treatments to address significant unmet medical needs in neurology and oncology.
These mature programs are focused on de-risked indications and are supported by robust proof-of-concept pre-clinical and clinical data.  Our three therapeutic programs include:
AST-OPC1 are a neural cell type called oligodendrocyte progenitor cells, which we manufacture from our pluripotent stem cell platform. With support of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) our initial clinical program is developing this cellular therapy for the treatment of spinal cord injury, a devastating condition affecting 12,000 patients per year in the U.S. with no currently approved therapies. We are currently enrolling patients in a Phase 1/2a clinical trial in acute, cervical (neck) spinal cord injury.
AST-VAC1 is an autologous (patient-specific) immunotherapy treatment for Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) patients. AST-VAC1 has the potential to supplement current chemotherapy regimens in order to improve long-term remission for these patients, as demonstrated in a phase 2 trial.
AST-VAC2 is an allogeneic (non-patient specific) immunotherapy manufactured from our pluripotent stem cell platform. We have partnered with Cancer Research-UK (CRUK) to investigate AST-VAC2 in non-small cell lung cancer. Additionally, AST-VAC2 has potential applications in a wide range additional cancers, and is likely synergistic with other immunotherapies such as immune checkpoint inhibitors.
Our team has a long history of advancing therapies in regenerative medicine. Many of our senior leaders have extensive experience developing our technology assets prior to the inception of Asterias in 2012. The Asterias technology platforms are based upon a strong foundation of >400 issued and pending patents, biologic materials including cell banks, and scientific data which we acquired in 2013. While our near term focus is to build out the three pipeline treatments above, our flexible technology platforms could unlock broad therapeutic opportunities in the future.
We are a consolidated subsidiary of the BioTime family of companies, and are traded on the NYSE MKT under the ticker symbol AST.