If you haven’t heard of Regenerative medicine before, prepare to be astounded.
It is leading the charge in the field of regenerative medicine. Founded by Sir Martin Evans, Nobel Laureate, and Ajan Reginald, former Global Head of Emerging Technologies at Roche, as Cell Therapy Ltd (CTL) in 2009, the company rebranded in 2016.
Their aim? to research and uncover ways in which stem cells can be used to enhance healthcare throughout the world, including South American countries such as Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina and more.
Values
It is very much driven by its values, placing emphasis on particular merits, including:
- Specialist. Dedicated to innovation in particular to delivering medical firsts in those areas of specific disease that urgently require them.
- World-class. They pride themselves on being a platform for collaboration between world leaders in science, medicine and business. As an internationally renowned biotechnology company, the team leverages all available expertise to inform just how they can make maximum impact.
- Patient champions. Aims to transform patient healthcare, and as such, they champion the patient’s needs first and foremost, because that is what guides them in their stem cell quest.
- Virtuous. From the very beginning, they have been delivering on their promises and ensuring that all of their business operations are conducted with complete integrity.
- Access-driven. Access driven in that their mission is to transform the lives of patients whose needs are the greatest. Their commitment to meet this mission drives their dogged determination to ensure medicines are available worldwide.
- Exceptional. Supports and encourages all of their employees and business partners to be exceptional and achieve excellence in all they do.
This world-class powerhouse has been achieving from the outset, and in just a decade they have already blown the competition out of the water, creating over 20 tissue-specific regenerative medicines.
What do they do?
Their focus is on developing stem cell therapies and gene therapies. More specifically, world-leading scientists are researching ways in which stem cells can be used to treat previously incurable diseases, as well as looking at how current treatments for cancer and heart failure can be improved.
One of the treatments that the team is in the process of developing is its investigational cardiac regenerative medicine.
Heartcel™ is a revolutionary treatment aimed at targeting patients with ischaemic heart disease who are undergoing coronary artery bypass graft, and who have just a 30% survival rate at 1 year.
In 2018, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency gave the green light, permitting them to carry out a potentially pivotal Phase IIb human clinical trial with Heartcel™.
The Heartcel™ trial will be conducted at Imperial College London’s Royal Brompton, UK, and is expected to complete in 2020. The adult heart failure trial will see Heartcel™, a tissue-engineered medicine, given to patients with heart failure in a bid to reduce heart scarring and to regenerate the heart tissue itself.
In early trials the stem cell gene therapy showed strong promise, meeting all of its endpoints, both statistically and clinically, and achieving 100% MACE (major adverse cardiac event) free survival.
Heartcel™ Phase II trial results:
- 30% improvement (on average) in left ventricular ejection fraction
- 40% reduction (on average) in left ventricle scar size
- 50% improvement (on average) in quality of patient’s life
- 100% MACE-free survival at 4 year follow up