Challenge
Many bone implants still fail due to rejection or infection, or fail to provide satisfactory functionality and regeneration. Transplantation of autologous bone is still the gold standard bone repair strategy. However, drawbacks are the limited availability of autologous bone for large defects and for patients with diseased bone, the additional trauma and infection risk caused at the harvest site, and insufficient regenerative capacity. Allografts and synthetic grafts avoid the additional trauma at the harvest site but may fail due to rejection in addition to having the insufficient regenerative capacity.
Opportunity
The global bone grafts and substitutes market size is expected to reach $4.15 billion by 2026. Every year approximately 2.2 million grafting procedures are performed worldwide.
Solution
TherageniX provides a solution to intraoperatively augment autologous bone grafts with regenerative gene therapies to promote their regenerative capacity, improve functional outcomes, and to reduce the additional trauma at the donor site. The first product is a combination of proprietary non-viral GET delivery system with desired regenerative factor genes (e.g. VEGF, BMP; for vascularization and osteogenesis, respectively) and autologous bone marrow cells from the patient. The extraction and application of this technology is completed intraoperatively and does not require ex vivo culture, meaning that bottlenecks in regulation, costs and manufacturing are effectively bypassed. Biomaterials can also be used in combination with the technology.
Status
This is an early stage TRL3 venture with first proof-of-concept in small animals. Next steps will require additional functional studies in a large animal model and optimization of the product for first-in-human use.
Meet the team
Gina Melchner
NLC Venture Partner
Gina joined NLC in February 2020. As a Venture Partner, she works with a portfolio of Biotech and Medtech ventures. Gina also leads NLC’s Medtech Domain, ensuring we build impactful new Medtech ventures year after year. Gina holds a master’s in biotechnology from ETH Zurich and worked in management consulting as well as venture capital before joining NLC.
James Dixon
Inventor