Producing Large Scale, Purified Human Pancreatic Islets for Diabetes R&D

Presented by
David W Scharp, MD, Prodo Laboratories

Academic and pharm-biotech diabetes research scientists rely on viable, high quality, human purified pancreatic islets for research. The webinar provides the details involved in human donor pancreas acceptance, delivery, distension and digestion by collagenase enzymes, followed by islet purification, culture and transportation from Southern California to global academic and corporate research scientists.

Prodo Laboratories has contracts with Organ Procurement Companies in the western USA to only accept high quality human pancreases from approved organ donors. Each donor offer is carefully screened before acceptance and islet isolation. Prodo developed and sells high quality tissue culture media for human islets that permit adequate islet functional recovery following the stress of islet processing and subsequent cell culture. 

Although Prodo Laboratories has been processing and delivering high quality human islets for research by global investigators since 2006, this webinar summarizes the results from the last six years of islet processing.  The information includes the current quality of cadaver-donated human pancreases, the results from islet isolation, purification and culture before shipment to global investigators located both in university and corporate entities for their research activities.

Meet the Presenter

david scharp

David W Scharp, MD
Prodo Laboratories

David ­­graduated from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, MO in 1970 and completed a Surgical Residency at Barnes Hospital in 1976 having also completed a two-year Research Fellowship under Paul Lacy, studying human pancreatic islets for research.  He joined the Surgical Faculty of Washington University School of Medicine as a clinical pancreatic surgeon and received NIH funded grants to continue his development of human islet function and transplantation.  In 1989 he joined Cytotherapeutics to pursue the development of encapsulated human islets for the treatment of diabetes.  In 1999 he founded Novocell and completed a FDA Phase I/II clinical trial of encapsulated human islets in 2005.  In 2006, Novocell became Prodo Laboratories and The Scharp-Lacy Research Institute in Irvine, CA.  With these new company and Institute, Dr. Scharp focused on the development of processing human pancreases from approved organ donors for clinical transplantation into the global distribution of purified human islets for research.  Prodo Laboratories has become the largest commercial global supplier of viable human islets for research. He has > 150 research publications and holds several patents in this field.

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