Stem Pharm Awarded $1.7M NIH SBIR Grant for Better Models of the Brain

Stem Pharm has been awarded a $1.7 million SBIR grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to optimize its induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-derived model of the central nervous system for drug discovery and toxicology applications. Stem Pharm’s model fills a commercial need to accurately reflect the complexity of cell types and important cell-to-cell interactions in the developing brain. It is the most comprehensive commercially available neural model and is particularly differentiated by the ability to study neuroinflammation, important for toxicology studies and implicated in devastating neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer’s Disease, Parkinson’s Disease, and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). Stem Pharm’s neural model is expected to add tremendous value in neural toxicology screening and may help reduce the reliance on animal testing for the biopharmaceutical and industrial chemical industries.