T-Cyte is dedicated to providing safe, effective, science-based products.

Throughout the 1980s, the worldwide medical community was in a race to find a cure for the deadly HIV/AIDS pandemic. Medical scientists were using the Feline Leukemia Virus (FeLV) and Feline Immunodeficiency Virus (FIV) as research models for the human diseases. Advances in understanding the immune system were moving at breakneck speed to find a treatment for AIDS.

But even before this all-out scientific chase, Dr. Terry Beardsley, a graduate researcher specializing in immunology at Baylor College of Medicine, had set out to discover a biological treatment pathway that emulated the body’s own, natural defense processes, a discovery that could reverse the fatal effects of severe combined immunodeficiency disease (SCID). This work was published¹ and provided a better understanding of bone marrow transplantation and the function of the thymus gland.

Prior to the discovery of the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) virus in 1981, Dr. Beardsley demonstrated, while a faculty member at UCLA, that retrovirus infection alters the structure of the thymus gland and its ability to produce mature functional T-Cells². The studies supported the theory that retrovirus infection of thymic epithelial cells caused defective T-Cell development, leading to immunodeficiency and/or leukemia³. In 1993⁴ the theory was ultimately proven that the destruction of thymic epithelium is a major contributor to failure of immune regeneration in AIDS.

It was also known that peptides extracted from thymus gland cells could somehow control the immune system’s response to viral attack. As a faculty member at the University of California, San Diego, Dr. Beardsley refined this cellular theory by being the first to clone thymic epithelial cells, successfully identifying and describing one of the immunoregulatory proteins involved in the process and the type of cells that produced it. Dr. Beardsley’s research findings culminated in a landmark publication in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science⁵.

By this time, anti-HIV drug cocktails had been developed, promising hope for patients undergoing treatment, but producing the unfortunate result of reduced funding for biological, immune restoration approaches to retroviruses.

Undaunted, Dr. Beardsley formed T-Cyte Therapeutics, Inc. to develop LTCI (Lymphocyte T-cell Immunomodulator) to treat the devastating effects of FeLV and FIV viruses in cats.