LifeSprout - Less Painful Soft Tissue Reconstruction for Cancer Patients

Currently, for patients like breast cancer survivors who have had mastectomies, state-of-the-art reconstruction requires taking soft tissue from another part of the body, causing a lot of pain and suffering. LifeSprout - a startup formed by Johns Hopkins University engineers, scientists and clinicians - has developed a soft tissue replacement alternative that will benefit cancer and trauma patients and others cosmetically. A composite of hydrogel and suture-like, biodegradable nanofibers, the injectable product is cell-permeable, holding the volume of the space until new tissue grows in. The product then dissolves.

Transcript

00:00:02 on a daily basis I do uh head to toe cancer trauma and cosmetic reconstruction there are millions of patients who undergo cancer operations every year one in eight women develop breast cancer here in the United States so there are hundreds of thousands of lumpectomy mastectomy defects and we offer state-of-the-art reconstruction but still if a patient has a soft tissue

00:00:24 defect or a bony defect we have to borrow tissue from another part of the body literally cut into the patient's body take the tissue out and then transplant it that causes a lot of pain and suffering I found a small lump on my left breast and a biopsy confirmed that it was cancer and I ended up with the bilateral

00:00:45 mastectomy the time and then there was a lot of unst about whether I really should do self-reconstruction because the recovery was going to be much longer so there were a lot of concerns these clinical situations have been the impetus for the research efforts that have now turned into life spr which is a name we've given to a small startup

00:01:09 we've uh established out of the university to develop an injectable product that will immediately set and fill in soft tissue defects in a three-dimensional fashion comp com so our product is really a composite where we have a hydrogel component and we have our nanofibers these short um fragments of this biodegradable sutal material which is dispersed throughout the

00:01:34 volume most of the current tissue filler are hydrogel based but we are using the fiber as a reinforcement component to provide the mechanical strength into the hydrogel Matrix and what's really Innovative and exciting about it is it feels just like your body's own soft tissues yet it's still so permeable so that the cells can grow into it and the

00:01:58 nanofibers also are able to to mimic the design of the Native tissue structure so our tissue regenerative Matrix works as a scaffold it fills the space and as it dissolves over time it allows the body to grow in and replace that form with the body's own tissue essentially what we've done it's almost like magic as a a professor at Hopkins I

00:02:27 think our primary role has always been to to doing a First Rate research but there is a big gap between the laboratory research and a clinical Stage production for example it typically takes 17 years on average to take a technology From the Bench all the way to clinical practice and thanks to the support of the Lewis Tuller fund the Cohen fund and Johns Hopkins Tech

00:02:50 Ventures provide an expertise for this kind of translational research my co-founders and I lifesprout are hoping to take our technology to clinical practice and to the market in only a few years this is seed money allowing us to take the idea the basic science idea translate this to a product and there's no limit in sort of how we can apply this um concept that began as an idea

00:03:17 that we could do something better for the cancer and trauma patients than what we're doing now doing great early November of 2015 I did have um deep reconstruction I feel very whole and very strong again thanks to Johns Hopkins and Dr saxs but yet I think about my daughters I'm worried that they may see cancer in their life but if they have this product I'm really hopeful

00:03:43 that it's going to revolutionize care which is so exciting what life Sprout is allowing me to do is to become part of something much greater than myself to affect not just one but hundreds and thousands of patients or millions of patients and to me you know as I evolve as a clinician and as a researcher I can't think of a better path to be

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