Prodo Labs announces being the recipient of two new grants from the Qualifying Therapeutic Discovery Grant (QTDG) funds from a combined NIH/IRS program to provide stimulus funds to small businesses working to develop new health care products.

The first grant is for producing Human Islets for Research & Development. This is Prodo Labs’ primary service business, where it distributes high quality human islets to some 16 global pharmaceutical companies as a critical resource for their development of new diabetes drugs. Through its collaboration with the Scharp-Lacy Research Institute, Prodo Labs also provides human islets to both JDRF funded and NIDDK / NIH funded academic researchers in diabetes.

The second QTDG grant funds a research program, which Prodo Labs began work on in 2009, to develop methods to expand primary human islets into an unlimited supply of normal functioning human insulin-producing cells. The goal of this research effort is to develop methods of growing unlimited numbers of new, normally functioning human islets from primary human islets. The preliminary results provided in the application suggest this goal may be achievable through these efforts.

These new grants provide critical payments needed for Prodo Labs to increase its islet service business for both corporate and academic diabetes investigators, as well as perform important research to develop an unlimited source of functional human islets for future transplantation. This will not only benefit patients with Type 1 Diabetes, but for the first time, it will allow for islet autotransplants for patients with Type 2 Diabetes.