Year 1

The planning award allowed the PI and members of the disease team to identify gaps in studies performed to date and strategically plan manufacturing and preclinical IND enabling studies to lead into a phase I clinical trial
The PI, Marcel Daadi, PhD assembled a team comprised of neurosurgeons, neurologists and scientists with expertise in Parkinson’s disease, a contract manufacturing organization (CMO) for cell production, a contract research organization (CRO) for the pharmacology and toxicology studies, and accomplished regulatory and project management consultants to work together on developing a cellular product for treating Parkinson’s disease.
Together with the members of the disease team, the PI established a detailed strategy to meet the overall goal of the project, to develop a human neural stem cell (NSC) line for transplantation into patients. The team put together a plan to manufacture the cells that included seven stages:
STAGE 1: Product manufacturing and process development in the PI laboratory, with CMO’s participation, in preparation for technology transfer including material sourcing, gap analysis of the current manufacturing and analytical process, development of product characterization profile, refinement of manufacturing and analytical procedures and development of requisite documentation.
STAGE 2: Technology transfer to CMO, comprised of training and establishing the necessary resources, perform the manufacturing process in house, demonstrate tech transfer and perform runs to manufacture GMP-like cell product suitable for non-GLP animal studies at the CRO facility.
STAGE 3: Manufacturing of GLP materials for use in the pre-clinical studies.
STAGE 4: Early pre-clinical non-GLP studies using materials that meet product release criteria. The preclinical studies will address critical issues such as delivery devise and approach, immuno-suppression regiment, dose-range finding study, imaging MRI/PET, micro-dialysis, immune response, behavioral outcome, dyskinesias, immunohistopathology and biochemical analysis.
STAGE 5: Formal GLP pre-clinical studies using the GMP materials manufactured at CMO with primary efficacy endpoint that is a significant change in the PD score without appearance of dyskinesias.
STAGE 6: Regulatory support activities, including pre-pre IND and pre-IND meetings, and compilation and filing of the IND.
STAGE 7: Full Process Qualification at the CMO, and manufacture of the GMP cell bank.
Among preclinical development studies proposed are a definitive single-dose toxicity and toxicokinetic study in rats with functional observation battery, a one year recovery period (GLP), tumorigenicity in NOD-SCID mice and study to determine dose-range for efficacy and safety in non-human primates.