New Milestone in Diabetes Research:
Transplanted Islet Cells May Protect Against Diabetes
Without Compulsory Use of Anti-Rejection Drugs
Dr. David White’s diabetes research has led to a medical research milestone. By co-transplanting Sertoli cells together with insulin-producing cells into diabetic rats, his recent research demonstrated that insulin-producing cells can survive (without the mandatory use of anti-rejection drugs), and can protect the rats against diabetes. The big breakthrough in Dr. White’s research was his substituting the Sertoli cells from adult pigs, instead of co-transplanting the Sertoli cells from baby pigs, as other researchers had grown accustomed to using in such transplants.

February 20, 2007
Sernova Corp
featuring Scientific Advisory Board Chair Dr. David White
highlights from audio appear below






Questions:
1. How long have you been involved in researching the reversal of diabetes?

I first started my interest in treating diabetes by transplantation of insulin cells when I was on faculty at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.

2. Please tell us about xenotransplantation and why this could play an important role in reversing diabetes.

The issue with using xenotransplantation is essentially one of numbers. You need human donors to produce the insulin-producing cells, and they are in short supply. If you look at the availability of humon donors in Canada, you're talking about 15 per million (of the population). What happens to the other 7,985 patients (per million)?

3.On February 5th, Sernova Corp announced the results of your recent diabetes research. The headline stated that Insulin-Producing Cells Could Survive and Function without Anti-Rejection Drugs. Why is that an important milestone in helping to find a way to reverse diabetes?

The big breakthrough we made was to discover that if you use Sertoli cells from adult pigs as opposed to what everybody else in the field has been doing using from sexually immature baby pigs, we get very much greater protection. In fact, we can completely suppress the immune response to pig insulin-producing cells with these adult Sertoli cells. What we've been able to do, is to co-transplant Sertoli cells and insulin-producing cells into diabetic rats and show these insulin-producing cells will survive and protect the rats against diabetes.

4. We are assuming Sernova Corp’s patented insulin-producing cellular replacement therapy, called Sertolin, is how he company plans to commercialize your ongoing research to help reverse diabetes. How quickly are you moving toward this goal, and what steps must you take before it could become commercially available?

We are pushing ahead as fast as possible and our next step is to gather all the data needed by the FDA to apply for an IND. That is permission to start a clinical trial in regulated countries - that would be the United States and Canada.

5. Upon which model are you basing your research? What are the strengths and deficiencies in this model?

6. Your company has assembled quite a prestigious Scientific Advisory Board. How did your peer group react to the results of your recent research? What advice did they offer?

We do have an excellent Scientific Advisory Board made up of some of the best experts in North America in the field. We presented our data to them a couple of weeks ago, and they got very excited.

7. What else should investors know about Sernova Corp and the research you are currently doing?

I think the important message is that our goal is to get clinical trials as rapidly as possible and our target is to be discussing those possibilities with the FDA by the end of this year.