AgeX Therapeutics Issues Year-End Letter to Shareholders – BioSpace

The letter follows.

Dear AgeX Stockholders,

In this, our first year as a public company, we have built a foundation for a revolutionary company in the fields of cell therapy and tissue regeneration. To date, conventional pharmaceutical approaches to the chronic degenerative conditions associated with aging have provided little benefit, often only offering relief from the symptoms of disease, rather than targeting underlying disease processes. Our belief is that this is about to change through harnessing the power of new cellular and molecular technologies. We aim to lead this coming revolution with our pioneering technologies which could generate and deliver new cells to patients through our cell therapy focus, and which may reverse the age of cells already in the body through our iTR platform. We believe that our new technologies will lead to true cell regeneration and replacement to potentially cure degenerative diseases by targeting aged or damaged cells, tissues and organs.

Over the last year, we have worked hard to achieve certain goals to set the fundamental basis to create shareholder value going forward:

To optimize shareholder value, we have undertaken a strategic review of our business opportunities, and we have four key take-away messages for the coming year and beyond:

UniverCyte would potentially be game-changing for the whole cell therapy industry by allowing the transplantation of non-self, donor cells into all patients without the need for powerful immunosuppressant drugs, which are associated with serious side effects, including infections and cancers, as well as kidney and liver toxicity. The UniverCyte platform aims to utilize a proprietary, novel, modified form of the powerful immunomodulatory molecule HLA-G, which in nature seems to be a dominant player in protecting a baby from destruction by the mother's immune system during pregnancy, the only known physiological state of immune tolerance toward foreign tissue in humans.

On the other hand, our pluripotent stem cell-based PureStem platform could potentially overcome numerous industry barriers. PureStem cells would have eight potential advantages compared to other adult stem cell- or pluripotent stem cell-based therapies, including lower manufacturing costs, industrial scalability, off-the-shelf usage, high purity, non-tumorgenicity, young age (so they are not prone to the disadvantages associated with older cells), aptitude for permanent cell engraftment, and potential to manufacture any human cell type.

We have two in-house product candidates, both targeting highly prevalent diseases of old age, with a high unmet medical need, and which are for multi-billion-dollar markets. Our lead internal program going forward will be AgeX-BAT1, which is brown fat cells for the treatment of type II diabetes. The last year has seen significant investment in cell therapy product candidates for diabetes by investors and large biotech. Earlier this year, we published a paper, Clonal Derivation of White and Brown Adipocyte Progenitor Cell Lines from Human Pluripotent Stem Cells, in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Stem Cell Research & Therapy, which showed that our PureStem platform generated highly pure, identifiable and scalable brown adipose cells, expressing active adipokines. Our second internal program will be AgeX-VASC1, composed of vascular endothelial progenitor cells for tissue ischemia, such as peripheral vascular disease and potentially cardiac and CNS ischaemia. Once we have a UniverCyte-modified pluripotent stem cell cGMP master cell bank, we will re-derive universal versions of AgeX-BAT1 and AgeX-VASC1 and then work to establish proof-of-concept in animal models.

We care deeply about our mission and the needs of our stockholders. We appreciate your support and the dedication of our scientists and employees as we forge a new future for medicine. We invite you to join us for the Annual Meeting of Stockholders on Monday, December 30, 2019. For those of you who cannot attend in person, our corporate update from that meeting will be webcast for your convenience.

Sincerely,

Michael D. West, Ph.D.

Gregory Bailey, M.D.

Chief Executive Officer

Chairman of the Board

About AgeX Therapeutics

AgeX Therapeutics, Inc. (NYSE American: AGE) is focused on developing and commercializing innovative therapeutics for human aging. Its PureStem and UniverCyte manufacturing and immunotolerance technologies are designed to work together to generate highly-defined, universal, allogeneic, off-the-shelf pluripotent stem cell-derived young cells of any type for application in a variety of diseases with a high unmet medical need. AgeX has two preclinical cell therapy programs: AGEX-VASC1 (vascular progenitor cells) for tissue ischemia and AGEX-BAT1 (brown fat cells) for Type II diabetes. AgeXs revolutionary longevity platform induced Tissue Regeneration (iTR) aims to unlock cellular immortality and regenerative capacity to reverse age-related changes within tissues. AGEX-iTR1547 is an iTR-based formulation in preclinical development. HyStem is AgeXs delivery technology to stably engraft PureStem cell therapies in the body. AgeX is developing its core product pipeline for use in the clinic to extend human healthspan and is seeking opportunities to establish licensing and collaboration agreements around its broad IP estate and proprietary technology platforms.

For more information, please visit http://www.agexinc.com or connect with the company on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube.

Forward-Looking Statements

Certain statements contained in this release are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Any statements that are not historical fact including, but not limited to statements that contain words such as will, believes, plans, anticipates, expects, estimates should also be considered forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from the results anticipated in these forward-looking statements and as such should be evaluated together with the many uncertainties that affect the business of AgeX Therapeutics, Inc. and its subsidiaries, particularly those mentioned in the cautionary statements found in more detail in the Risk Factors section of AgeXs Annual Report on Form 10-K and Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q filed with the Securities and Exchange Commissions (copies of which may be obtained at http://www.sec.gov). Subsequent events and developments may cause these forward-looking statements to change. AgeX specifically disclaims any obligation or intention to update or revise these forward-looking statements as a result of changed events or circumstances that occur after the date of this release, except as required by applicable law.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20191209005356/en/

View original post here:

AgeX Therapeutics Issues Year-End Letter to Shareholders - BioSpace