Why the Novo Nordisk Foundation is betting big on stem cells

In my last column about the Novo Nordisk Foundation, I wrote about the company’s efforts in anti-microbial resistance, an example of an area where impact investment was necessary to combat market incentives that stood in the way of solving a literal life-and-death problem.

But not all the areas where the Foundation invests its efforts are so reactive. There are also proactive areas, where promising new technologies can languish for lack of a clear, strong profit-making case to motivate investors.

One area along these lines where the Novo Nordisk Foundation has invested quite heavily is in cell therapy, especially stem cell research. 

Stem cell research and cell therapy

It’s not controversial that stem cells have tremendous potential to revolutionise medicine. 

“Two decades ago, we had a very embryonic understanding of how stem cells can differentiate and become different cells in the human body. Today, we can induce stem cells to become any cell in the body in less than 21 days. Stem cell medicine will come of age soon,” Foundation CEO Mads Krogsgaard Thomsen said. “The big problem is that people who are stem cell researchers, they are working in a complicated environment with costly equipment and typically will not be able to afford the scale-up that will enable a clinical trial to be performed.”

Given the great cost of developing these biologics – which can be 10 times as expensive to make as small molecules – potential isn’t enough to motivate risk-based investors.

“This is a way of avoiding the valley of death,” Thomsen said.

As they did with anti-microbial resistance, the Novo Nordisk Foundation has approached the boosting of stem cell research through multiple different initiatives.

reNEW, the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Stem Cell Medicine, was launched in January 2022 and it supports stem cell research across three international sites in Denmark, Australia, and the Netherlands.

“We take a very holistic view of what stem cell medicine provides as an opportunity,” Melissa Little, reNEW’s CEO said. “We are very interested in not just chronic disease and regenerative medicine, but also in rare disease and many of the conditions that have unmet needs. And we are interested in applying stem cells and a fundamental understanding of stem cell technology, to disease modelling, so, using human stem cells to model organs in a damaged state and actually use that as a platform for drug development.”

But reNEW isn’t just about funding research – it’s about funding research and making sure it actually goes somewhere.

“What we want is research excellence and then those researchers, with a 10-year horizon, are both facilitated and required to take their ideas and pivot them towards targeted outcomes,” Little said. “So, this is really trying to provide a safe environment for those researchers to take that translational risk, which is often hard for them to do.”

That means training academic researchers to think early in terms of commercialisation, as well as preparing them for the hurdles they might encounter.

“There have been a lot of exciting possibilities for stem cell medicine, but it’s still a very constricted pipeline,” Little said. “And that pipeline is constricted right at the beginning, where it’s risky for an academic to take a project forward. It’s also constructed around cellular manufacturing, and then constricted around the regulatory framework.”

To that last point, reNEW is working with the representatives of the European Medicines Agency (EMA) to help deliver clarity to its researchers, Little said.

Enter the Cellerator

It’s this multiplicity of barriers that has led the foundation to double-down with the recently-announced Cellerator, a facility at the Technical University of Denmark that will focus on supporting preclinical testing and manufacturing, scaling processes, and giving cell therapy researchers access to the equipment and resources that might otherwise constitute an inescapable bottleneck.

“We will collaborate with the researchers, but we will also establish a number of strategic partnerships in order to assure that the path from the testing in the laboratories and into the clinical trials is as short as possible, but also as cost-efficient as possible,” Carlsen said.

Not only do they want to support individual innovators: they want to improve the whole ecosystem, including manufacturing, raw material availability, and strengthening the talent pipeline.

“I think investors […] have a concern over the risk-benefit,” Thomas Carlsen, the CEO of the Novo Nordisk Foundation’s new Cellerator programme, said. “So, this will be an opportunity for showcasing much more of that […] and hopefully then enabling future investment to be much more straightforward and also reduce the manufacturing costs – thereby reducing the risk of investment.”

For more information about reNEW and Cellerator, you can check out video interviews with both Little and Carlsen below.

Editor’s Note: The Novo Nordisk Foundation provided lodging in and transportation to Copenhagen for our correspondent. The Foundation was not given any assurance of editorial coverage of the event, positive or negative, nor were they granted prior review of any editorial materials.