From the press release:
BioLife Solutions Inc. , a leading developer and marketer of proprietary hypothermic storage and cryopreservation media products for cells and tissues, today announced a supply and licensing agreement with Intercytex Group plc, a Cambridge, UK, and Boston-based cell therapy company.
The agreement lasts 10 years and covers permits Intercytex access to the HypoThermosol storage and preservation media for both VAVELTA (ICX-RHY), the facial rejuvenation product, which is expected to hit the market soon, as well as ICX-TRC, the hair regeneration product still under development.
Intercytex Chief Executive Nick Higgins said:
“We completed a thorough evaluation of several commercial and generic …read more

Intercytex – who shall henceforth be known casually as Mr. Roboto – is raising cash with an institutional stock offering. The biotech is offering 23M shares and 52 pence each to institutional investors across Europe and the UK. The money will be used “to complete a number of key value-driving steps, including the market launch of its first product Vavelta for facial rejuvenation and the completion of the Phase III trial for ICX-PRO.”

Inercytex, the UK company working to clone/regenerate human tissue, announced preliminary 2006 financials on Friday.
The company said its loss before tax for the year was £9.2 million, compared to £7.2miliion a year ago. Loss on ordinary activities after taxation was £8.20 million, compared to £6.51 million in the previous year. Loss per share for the year narrowed to 15.0p from 20.6p in the prior year. Operating income reported for the year was £0.83 million. (source)
(American readers: double all the numbers and you’ve got a quick and dirty dollar conversion that are good enough for our purposes.)
Nothing really surprises me here. …read more

The UK Motley Fool site has a review of Intercytex, the British Biotech that recently secured a federal grant to continue development of hair replacement robots.

Seems UK politics is as muddled as US politics. Here are the facts according to a This Is London article:

Sir Christopher Evans is chairman and founder of a biotech investment firm, Merlin Biosciences.
Merlin Biosciences owns a 14 per cent share in Intercytex, whose value increased dramatically after the announcement of a grant from the government’s Technology Programme.
Sir Christopher was previously an adviser to the government, and as a result of his advice the previously mentioned Technology Programme was established within the Department of Trade and Industry to supply UK firms with grants to develop new technologies.

Now, it doesn’t appear that …read more

Domo Arigato, Mr. Hair Roboto
This could be something straight from the pages of a sci-fi novel. Intercytex recently received $3.5 million to develop a robotically enhanced hair replacement therapy.
Seriously.
$3.5 million for hair robots.
This sounds like the next stage of development in the stem cell process I mentioned back in April. From what I can gather, the robots won’t actually be crawling around on your head, (though I wouldn’t mind it so long as they gave a nice massage while they were up there.) Instead, the robots will be working to accelerate the multiplication of skin cells removed from the patients …read more

It’s a hair replacement kind of week here at Baldiness. The Independent serves up a story about using stem-cell technology to treat baldness. From the article:
Hair is grown by the dermal papilla cells in skin. These can be removed and grown in a laboratory dish. Normally,these lab cells lose their ability to grow hairs, but add keratinocyte stem cells to the dermal papilla cells and the new cells are able to grow hairs when injected back into a bald head. Because no drugs are involved, and the human cells are unmodified, there are no side effects. New growth should become …read more