Group Company Merger Establishes European Headquarters

Japanese regenerative medicine company ReproCELL Inc, has merged two of its group companies, Biopta and Reinnervate, to form ReproCELL Europe Ltd.  The move integrates Biopta’s human tissue services with Reinnervate’s stem cell and 3D cell culture expertise. The new company will operate from headquarters in Glasgow, UK, with an established production and distribution site in Sedgefield, UK. It aims to grow the workforce over the next three years and plans a move to larger premises in Glasgow within the next nine months. 

Dr David Bunton, Biopta’s co-founder and now CEO of ReproCELL Europe, said: “The merger of the two UK companies is a great opportunity to build on the solid platform Biopta has in outsourced drug discovery services and combine this with Reinnervate’s expertise in 3D cell culture and stem cell technology.  As the drug market moves towards a personalised medicine approach, this will allow our company to increase our market share by expanding our range of human tissue drug discovery assays aimed at the pharmaceutical industry, and also accelerate the development of ReproCELL’s new iPSC products and services.”

Established in 2003, many of ReproCELL’s technologies were developed by the stem cell pioneers, Prof. Norio Nakatsuji from the Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences, Kyoto University, and Prof. Hiromitsu Nakauchi from The Institute of Medical Sciences, The University of Tokyo. 

ReproCELL’s CEO, Dr. Chikafumi Yokoyama, said of the merger: “This is an exciting development for ReproCELL and crucial for our expansion into the European market.  Scotland is one of Europe’s top locations for stem cell research and we feel our European headquarters will be ideally placed for expansion of our stem cell products and services.”