TOKYO — Two Japanese medical equipment and pharmaceutical companies are accelerating efforts to put their regenerative medicine businesses to commercial use, as Japan has revised a law to help catch up with the U.S. and Europe in making regenerative medicine products.
will start producing for sale cell sheets for cardiac arrest, called HeartSheet, in April this year. In September 2015 the Tokyo-based medical equipment company received official approval for producing and selling these cell sheets that are made from human cells.
The company will set up a full-fledged production system at its research and development center in Kanagawa Prefecture, just southwest of Tokyo, in spring this year. Terumo expects to spend about 300 million yen ($2.49 million) on this project. “We would like to develop this business to be worth around 1 billion to 2 billion yen over the next five to 10 years,” said Terumo President Yutaro Shintaku.
Meanwhile, plans to launch a facility dedicated to culturing induced pluripotent stem cells in the city of Kobe, in western Japan’s Hyogo Prefecture, as early as 2017. This is part of the company’s efforts to develop what will become Japan’s first drug stemming from induced pluripotent stem cells.
The Osaka-based pharmaceutical company will invest a total of 2.2 billion yen to create such a facility.
Regenerative medicine is created from human cells and is used to make up for damaged tissues and organs. Experts have expectations that such medicines may be able to treat diseases that are difficult to cure with conventional chemically-synthesized drugs.
Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry estimates that the domestic regenerative medicine market will be valued at 95 billion yen in 2020 and at 1 trillion yen by 2030.
Japan revised its Pharmaceutical Affairs Law and implemented the Pharmaceutical and Medical Device Law in November 2014, which has significantly cut the time it takes to gain approval from the government.
