ReMDO grants support commercialization of regenerative medicine therapies

Biomanufacturing efforts expand in the RegenMed Hub

2023-09-12

(Press-News.org) WINSTON-SALEM, NC, September 12, 2023 - When the RegenMed Development Organization (ReMDO) offered its grant opportunity related to regenerative medicine manufacturing and commercialization, the result exceeded expectations.

The Regenerative Medicine Manufacturing grant call encouraged small, medium, and large companies to submit letters of interest with an accompanying white paper that addressed a gap in technical capabilities for one or more of the following topic areas: Cell and Biomaterial Manufacturing, Standards and Quality Control, Additive Manufacturing and Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Automation.

The grant opportunity will create a continued impact on the rate of clinical translation for regenerative medicine therapies and the commercialization of regenerative medicine products within the global market.

The award recipient companies -- Phase Holographic Imaging (PHI), BioSpherix, SAS Institute and QIAGEN -- created a strategic technology development collaboration/alliance that will advance biomanufacturing in the Regenerative Medicine Hub and the region. Award amounts ranged from $50,000 to $200,000.

Through the alliance, the companies are creating the AI-based process control tools needed for automated biomanufacturing of cell-based therapies, resulting in more cost-effectiveness with superior efficacy and safety. Supported work utilizes ReMDO’s state-of-the-art facilities and Test Bed.

The RegenMed Hub is a regenerative medicine ecosystem powered by ReMDO and WFIRM and located in the Innovation Quarter, an epicenter of highly interactive science and technology companies and resources. The RegenMed Hub offers companies access to unparalleled resources to advance education, products, and manufacturing with the ultimate goal of improving patient care through ReMDO’s RegeneratOR program which includes the Test Bed, the Innovation AcceleratOR and a workforce development program.

“By offering a grant opportunity to focus on manufacturing gaps, we can help get the right companies and entrepreneurs involved to help drive the need to successfully translate regenerative medicine to clinical practice and get products and technologies to the global market quickly,” said ReMDO Chief Technology Officer Joshua Hunsberger, PhD.

Cell therapies are today cultured and manufactured in an open laboratory environment. For this alliance, BioSpherix is providing a sealed, sterile and cell-friendly environment where cells are cultured at controlled temperature, oxygen and CO2 levels without human contact.

The close to 12,000 employees of the SAS Institute supply analytics and data management software to over 80,400 business, government and university sites. SAS provides the AI expertise and software infrastructure to automatically analyze the wealth of data collected by the QIAGEN and PHI instrumentation. The analysis result will be fed back to continuously control the complex biomanufacturing process.

The 6,000-employee strong QIAGEN is providing the DNA, RNA and protein molecular data it offers to more than 500,000 customers around the globe. Equally important, PHI is providing non-invasive single-cell imaging data quantifying cellular behavior and morphology without using compromising reagents.

“The vision for the RegenMed Hub and its programs is coming to fruition,” said Anthony Atala, MD, director of WFIRM. “When companies like these team up to solve biomanufacturing problems, everyone benefits.”

About the RegenMed Development Organization

The mission of the RegenMed Development Organization (ReMDO) is to accelerate the discovery and translation of regenerative medicine therapies. ReMDO is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization that manages a clinical translation initiative that includes thought leaders, representatives from leading US research centers, government representatives, and companies of all sizes. ReMDO conducts research to de-risk technologies and speed up the translation of regenerative medicine to clinical practice and to the global market. ReMDO manages the world’s first and only professional organization dedicated solely to advancing the regenerative medicine field, the Regenerative Medicine Manufacturing Society (RMMS), and the Regenerative Medicine Manufacturing Innovation Consortium (RegMIC), which manages a private-public partnership of industry and academic members focused on scaling up technologies.

About the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine

The Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine is recognized as an international leader in translating scientific discovery into clinical therapies, with many world firsts, including the development and implantation of the first engineered organ in a patient. Over 400 people at the Institute, the largest in the world, work on more than 40 different tissues and organs. A number of the basic principles of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine were first developed at the Institute. WFIRM researchers have successfully engineered replacement tissues and organs in all four categories – flat structures, tubular tissues, hollow organs and solid organs – and 15 different applications of cell/tissue therapy technologies, such as skin, urethras, cartilage, bladders, muscle, kidney, and vaginal organs, have been successfully used in human patients. The Institute, which is part of Wake Forest School of Medicine, is located in the Innovation Quarter in downtown Winston-Salem, NC, and is driven by the urgent needs of patients. The Institute is making a global difference in regenerative medicine through collaborations with over 400 entities and institutions worldwide, through its government, academic and industry partnerships, its start-up entities, and through major initiatives in breakthrough technologies, such as tissue engineering, cell therapies, diagnostics, drug discovery, biomanufacturing, nanotechnology, gene editing and 3D printing.

Media Contact: Emily Gregg, egregg@wakehealth.edu

END

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Breast cancer recurrence may be triggered by chemotherapy injury to non-cancer cells

2023-09-12

A standard chemotherapy drug injures surrounding non-cancer cells, which can then awakens dormant cancer cells and promotes cancer growth, according to a new study publishing September 12th in the open access journal PLOS Biology by Ramya Ganesan of Emory University, US, and colleagues. The finding is important for understanding cancer recurrence and may point to important new targets to prevent it. Advances in cancer treatment, including chemotherapy, have dramatically reduced mortality for many types of cancer, including breast cancer. Nonetheless, up to 23% of breast cancer patients experience recurrence within the first five years. Treatment is meant to kill all cancer cells, ...

Disease-resistant rice and wheat plants may modulate disease susceptibility in their neighbors

2023-09-12

Growing several plant varieties in the same field for disease resistance is a longstanding agricultural practice, but can have unpredictable results. A study publishing September 12th in the open access journal PLOS Biology by Jean-Benoit Morel at Institut National de Recherche pour l'Agriculture l'Alimentation et l'Environnement, Montpellier, France, and colleagues suggests that plant-to-plant interactions may confer disease immunity in both wheat and rice. Neighbor-Modulated Susceptibility (NMS) occurs when healthy, same-species ...

Umass Amherst research finds benefits, risks in state-mandated school-based BMI assessments

2023-09-12

A University of Massachusetts Amherst resource economist finds mandated in-school Body Mass Index (BMI) assessments adopted in varying forms by 24 states to combat childhood obesity have the potential to improve the health of some students while introducing body-image issues for others. The research is believed to be the first to assess these policies as a whole, rather than in single states or school districts. “In states that passed these laws, overweight and obese teens were more likely to correctly describe their bodies as such, compared to states ...

UNIST and University of Ulsan College of Medicine to introduce groundbreaking HST curriculum in Korea!

2023-09-12

In a significant collaboration, UNIST and the University of Ulsan College of Medicine (hereinafter ‘U of U College of Medicine’) have successfully developed a joint curriculum aimed at cultivating professionals with interdisciplinary expertise. This unique program seeks to bridge the gap between engineering and medicine, producing graduates who possess both medical knowledge and engineering understanding. The collaboration aims to contribute effectively to advancements in healthcare technology and innovation. The jointly developed curriculum consists of seven courses, including ‘Introductions to Medical Science AI‘ and ‘Brain and Cognitive ...

How the respiratory tract microbiome influences the severity of bacterial pneumonia

2023-09-12

Pneumonia is an infection of the lung alveoli caused by bacteria, viruses or fungi. It is one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality worldwide, representing a clinical and economic burden and a global public health problem. The microbial ecosystem (or microbiome) of the human respiratory tract colonizes different niches. The respiratory tract microbiome is of interest to scientists as it contributes to human health by stimulating the immune system and protecting against infection by pathogens. Scientists ...

Researchers develop new method for mapping the auditory pathway

2023-09-12

Researchers have developed a non-invasive method for mapping the human auditory pathway, which could potentially be used as a tool to help clinicians decide the best surgical strategy for patients with profound hearing loss. The findings, published today in eLife, highlight the importance of early interventions to give patients the ability to hear and understand speech, so that their auditory-language network can develop properly and their long-term outcomes are improved. Sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) occurs when the sensitive hair cells inside the cochlea are damaged, or when there is damage to the auditory nerve which transmits sound to the brain. A person with profound hearing ...

FAIRer knowledge about biodiversity with AI-friendly nanopublications

2023-09-12

Earlier this year, in a pilot project, the teams of high-tech startup Knowledge Pixels and open-access scholarly publisher and technology provider Pensoft released a novel workflow to publicly share and future-proof scientific findings by means of nanopublications. Nanopublications complement human-created narratives of scientific knowledge with elementary, machine-actionable, simple and straightforward scientific statements that prompt sharing, finding, accessibility, citability and interoperability. By making it easier to trace individual findings back to their origin and/or follow-up updates, it also helps to better understand the provenance of biodiversity ...

Real-world examples demonstrate how systems science can address health inequities

2023-09-12

September 12, 2023 – As researchers increasingly recognize that causes for health issues are structural and interrelated, real-world, innovative case studies demonstrate the value of applying systems science to evaluate health interventions and address health inequities as seen in a special supplement, supported by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, in the October/December issue of Family & Community Health. The journal is published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer. Systems science offers an effective paradigm for examining and addressing various health issues to improve outcomes and reduce health inequities. The case ...

New neural insights into processing uncertainty in obsessive-compulsive disorder

2023-09-12

Philadelphia, September 12, 2023 – Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a neurological disorder characterized by repeated behaviors such as cleaning and checking despite clear objective evidence of cleanliness, orderliness, and correctness. Although the disease is often mischaracterized as a disorder of “fussiness,” the disorder actually stems from difficulty in processing uncertainty. However, the neural underpinnings of that aberrant processing remains unknown. Now, a new study in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, published by Elsevier, uses brain imaging to get a closer look at the underpinnings of uncertainty processing ...

15 psychological scientists receive APS’s 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award

2023-09-12

The Association for Psychological Science (APS) has awarded the 2024 APS Lifetime Achievement Awards to 15 psychological scientists whose contributions have advanced understanding of topics ranging from how to alleviate human suffering to cultural differences and similarities in mental processes. APS’s four lifetime achievement awards—the APS James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award, the APS Mentor Award, the APS William James Fellow Award, and the APS James S. Jackson Lifetime Achievement Award for Transformative Scholarship—are the association’s highest honors, and their recipients are among the field’s most accomplished and respected ...

Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia researchers find community health workers play critical role in coordinating asthma care across home, school and community

ReMDO grants support commercialization of regenerative medicine therapies

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES: