Shortening transportation of iPS cell products to US by more than 20 hours has brought the treatment of Parkinson's disease one step closer

In our work on the development of regenerative and cellular pharmaceuticals using induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, Sumitomo Pharma is developing world-first iPS-cell-derived products for treating Parkinson’s disease. Parkinson’s is a serious disease associated with the loss of nerve cells in the brain that are involved in movement. Its symptoms include shaking and stiffness. In Japan, Kyoto University commenced a treatment in 2018 that worked by introducing nerve cells grown from human iPS cells into the brain. Sumitomo Pharma, RACTHERA, and S-RACMO (a joint venture between Sumitomo Chemical and Sumitomo Pharma) are currently working together on the manufacture and sales of nerve cells grown from these iPS cells, with work toward gaining government approval currently underway.

With a view to undertaking clinical trials on human patients in the USA, we now have a project underway for air freighting iPS-cell-derived nerve cells from Japan to the University of California San Diego campus in California, USA. This project has Mitsubishi Logistics, Inabata, and JAL working together to establish practices for the temperature-controlled air freighting of live cells in a way that ensures reliable quality.

RACTHERA is a joint venture between Sumitomo Chemical and Sumitomo Pharma. It was established on February 1, 2025 by spinning off Sumitomo Pharma’s operations for using iPS cells in regenerative and cellular medicine. RACTHERA’s main business activities include the research, development, manufacture, sales, import, and export of regenerative medicine and related products, specific cell products, and regenerative and cellular pharmaceutical products. We have control of the overall project and work in partnership with Sumitomo Chemical and Sumitomo Pharma and with our production supplier S-RACMO. I belong to the Strategic Planning Department at RACTHERA where I manage business planning, setting the direction for our regenerative and other medical activities.

Transportation trials for sending cellular pharmaceuticals to America commenced in 2020. While we initially outsourced cell transportation to a provider that specialized in this work, the problem with this was that delivery took between 60 and 70 hours from the time the consignment departed Japan.

From 2021, we enlisted the help of Mitsubishi Logistics, a company with expertise in logistics, and Inabata, a trading company, and were able to shorten this time down to 40 hours. Unfortunately, we still had problems with unreliable delivery times, which could take as long as 60 hours depending on the circumstances. Lacking our own expertise in transportation, we could not see where the holdups were happening and we even considered abandoning the project.

At the suggestion of Mitsubishi Logistics, we got JAL involved in the project in 2022. With the shared goal of achieving delivery within 24 hours, we tried used a charter flight as a way of improving the time, succeeding in bringing it down to less than 19 hours.

This outcome was a testament to the extensive expertise of JALCARGO’s J SOLUTIONS PHARMA pharmaceuticals transportation service. JAL has staff on-station not only at the airport in Kansai but also in Los Angeles. With their support, shipments were accompanied from the cargo compartment through to delivery to the cargo depot. Not only did this reduce time losses, it also ensured rigorous quality control.

When shipping goods overseas, language barriers pose a major impediment more often than you might expect. In this regard, we felt we could be confident when using J SOLUTIONS PHARMA that our cargo would be handled smoothly as communications would be dealt with by JAL’s Japanese staff at the destination. Similarly, the ability to recover from any problems that arise during transportation and the flexibility to make changes to transportation routes were also deciding factors in our choice of J SOLUTIONS PHARMA.

Another major factor was the reassurance we felt from knowing that, by having Japanese staff at the destination, they would understand the precious nature of our consignments and handle them with care. Temperature control and the effects of vibration are the two factors that call for the most care when transporting iPS-cell-derived products. More so than ordinary pharmaceuticals, temperature control is especially vital for iPS-cell-derived products. The containers are specially designed to prevent temperature fluctuations and great care is taken to prevent the cells from suffering damage. Similarly with vibration, because there is no way of knowing what effect it may have on the cells, consignments must be handled carefully without exposing them to vibration.

Reliable delivery practices were successfully established thanks to the ongoing preparation work that went in beforehand, including the training for the transportation trials. Everyone working on the project was very satisfied with the J SOLUTIONS PHARMA service. I still remember the surprise and delight expressed throughout the company in 2022 when the first transportation trial using a chartered aircraft succeeded in shortening the delivery time by as much as 40 hours.

As the transportation of iPS-cell-derived products has posed a challenge for the medical industry, this success has a ground-breaking significance. We are now at the stage of clinical trials. Once these clinical trials have been successfully accomplished, I believe that the transportation system for cell-based pharmaceuticals that we have established in this project has the potential to become widely adopted as a new business model. In the future, I hope that we can continue working in partnership with JAL to make progress toward further advances in medicine.