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NeuroPair: A New Treatment Approach for Spinal Cord Injury

Spinal Cord Injury (SCI) afflicts 17,000 Americans and 700,000 people worldwide each year. Prognoses are often tragic, and social costs exceed $2 million in the first 5 years of care. For decades, the dream of repairing the spinal cord has been elusive. Recent studies, however, show that new axonal growth and formation of functional circuits are possible under the right conditions: a favorable biophysical environment in direct contact with surviving nerve endings. Chances for recovery increase greatly if such an environment can be provided rapidly after injury.

NeuroPair's fast and minimally invasive approach generates an injectable scaffold of aligned magnetic nanoparticles to create conditions for protecting, healing, and regrowing neurons that were damaged during SCI. The scaffold guides the direction of neuronal regrowth and may help enable recovery from SCI.

Because shape and condition of SCIs vary so much, one-size-fits-all approaches are very unlikely to succeed. NeuroPair’s injectable hydrogel formulation addresses these needs by perfectly filling any irregular shape of the injury site, generating a flexible fiber scaffold with cellular contact for neuronal regeneration within minutes, suppressing scar formation, and being compatible with other treatment options (such as stem cells, neuroprotective and bioactive growth factors, epidural stimulation, and MRI). No other approach like this exists.

For more information, visit here  .

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    00:00:01 and um also judges just to let you know we'll collect the scoring sheets at the end of the last presentation for the tabulation at the end so we'll take the folders at that point welcome back and let's get started again so for the medical category the finalist is a new treatment approach for spinal cord injury and let me welcome Dr Joanna strick who will be presenting the idea

    00:00:29 today welcome thank you I had a co-presenter Dr Anne par she got her right got stuck to the airport in a traffic jam accident so unfortunately she couldn't make it so you're right about taking the flight before which she couldn't couldn't really do this time so I'm Dr yanana saish the CEO of neurop paare we're developing the first approach to spinal

    00:00:56 cord injury that protects and guides the bod's own tissue to um help recovery functional recovery and provide long um avoid long-term injury spinal Cod injury is a devastating illness with no cure there are about uh 700,000 cases worldwide every year 177,000 cases in the US and the the cost for the patient is very high most of the two-thirds of the um

    00:01:30 accidents two-thirds of the injuries are caused by accidents or Falls the Rest by Sports accidents or other causes when you have an injury the patient is directed to a trauma hospital that has a SP spinal cord injury specialty so the trauma neurosurgeons at the hospital would be our first proponents uh for the treatment um you have the payers after FDA clinical trial

    00:02:00 approval that would be regular medical insurance Medicare Veterans Administration and the biggest component that you can save the cost is related to hospitalization and Rehab so those reducing those costs are the benefits to the buyers the treatment cost is projected at $200,000 which is a credible number based on information from the re

    00:02:24 Foundation uh medical device experts and uh legal settlements so just for acute spinal cord injury uh the market is about half a billion dollar every year in the US this would be 14% of the 177,000 patients so about 2,400 the worldwide Market is more like 4.4 billion that would be 5% and again it's only for acute spinal cord injury there are large additional markets uh

    00:02:54 for chronic spinal cord injury so it's likely we can do this too um peripheral nerve injuries the market is a little bit bigger and the veterinary use our key Innovation is that we can guide neuronal growth with an injectable scaffold that perfectly conforms to any shape of an injury site um it provides a guidance for neurons and it's fast and minimally invasive so we have uh an

    00:03:27 issued patent and several other pending patents applications for the technology Dr pars technology at the University of Minnesota her key Innovation is that she can accelerate the differentiation of stem cells so stem cells are a very promising approach for spinal cord injury but also for other ones it was just yesterday one where they did an eye transplant and

    00:03:52 they hope to actually regenerate Vision By by an eye transplant so she can turn skin cells of a patient into spinal neural stem cells so this process here you take a small biopsy and you differentiate them amplify them and then you can inject them into the same person which means there will be no rejection if you have other other stem cells other patient cells there could be rejection

    00:04:21 so this means they can be co- injected with our injectable scaffold in a combination therapy that would be Universal and ready for the patient when the patient is ready for that for that intervention so the the way this works you have this injury here that could be uh a complete cut or Crush filled with blood or other fluid the neurosurgeon

    00:04:51 would carefully remove something of the blood and then you fill it with the combination of the magnetic part I Les and the spinal neural stem cells you then apply a magnetic field this is like we call this a magnetic Mouse it has magnets on the side you put it on top of the um cord and it within minutes you you create these magnetically formed fibers that's exactly the same thing as

    00:05:22 when you play it in elementary school with with iron filings on a piece of paper and you put a magnet underneath they follow the the field lines this is exactly the same approach only like a 100 times smaller and I I was at a conference where people have tried to make injectable scaffolds where they already have fibers aligned but that doesn't

    00:05:46 really work because it's like being in here with a 30 foot ladder and you can't really um turn it in in a crowded space the spinal cord is is difficult it's viscus and you can't really arrange it so I thought wait a minute I've worked with Magnetic particles for a long long time and if you inject the particles they can actually diffuse and go in any every little nook and cranny that you

    00:06:07 have and then you apply the field and you create the fibers they get cross-link a biodegradable DNA from the person we can use a buckle swab of the person's own DNA cross link the fibers and then after a few minutes five minutes you can take the magnet away and the fibers remain like this this is the device that I just showed it's very simple it has two rows

    00:06:32 of magnets here with the window in the middle and you would then place it after the stabilization whenever you're ready with the patient to after the injection to line the fibers and create the fibers in the in the center of it on the left you can see a microscopic image Jason poala from Princeton who's here too um you can see individual neurites from sepal um

    00:07:00 axons neurons that grow along these fibers here this is an xplant so a part of a spinal cord from a pig roughly the same size of a human and you can see here if you have an R regular shaped injury the the fibers completely perfectly bind and connect with the outside and so establishing this molecular contact is really important to have a graft host interaction so

    00:07:34 scaffolds that have been used by now by other companies they're basically blunt cylinders or something like this you have to cut the spinal cord and then you put them in and even then it's not a good connection to most of the remaining axons on on the other end so with our injectable scaffold it's not only simpler but it creates much better contact for the neurons then to talk to

    00:07:59 each other The Limited treatment options today there's no surgical opportunity you have to stabilize the injury and then wait um of course the neurotrauma surgeons want to have minimally invasive surgery surgery and Rehabilitation is then the most common treatment what's common is they say time is spine or less time is more spine so like in a heart

    00:08:25 attack or a stroke you the chances for Recovery are greatly improved if you can do it quickly competitors um not counting the stem cell approach right now these implants that I already mentioned there are compounds they've been in the news the last couple years they're bioactive fibers they can go uh enhance the um growth and electrical stimulation that

    00:08:51 was also in the news implants have to be inserted that's that's a problem and they take fabrication the other ones however they perfectly compatible with what we're doing so we can most likely combine these bioactive fibers electrical stimulation in in combination with the stem cells and the scaffold to make it better no competitor in this field has been able to um have any

    00:09:16 success in humans yet we've raised initial funding showed that it works in the lab um We're translating it now uh into 3D we do animal studies so we're we're working with simple uh r spinal cord magnets we also work with Eve Tai in ottaa she works with human spinal cords xplants it's it's amazing it can be a shortcut because you get to work with two days of aive tissue

    00:09:47 defined from a donor that's recently deceased and you you get like a glimpse into what works in humans so that you don't go a long time into animal experiments and all of a sudden you you figure out it doesn't work in humans so on the regulatory side again there's three sort of shortcuts that not really shortcuts but they're legitimate ways that make it easier for you the orphan

    00:10:10 designation I already mentioned or maybe I didn't and then there's a uman humanitarian device exemption that's a type of pre-market application that speeds up the regulatory process there's also the Breakthrough devices program there's already one invivo Therapeutics competitor that has been um entered into the Breakthrough devices program so that also in in in summary accelerates and

    00:10:37 reduces the cost of the regulatory process that's my last slide um people always say for a startup you need the perfect team the perfect VC the perfect lawyers and everything and that that's not possible I mean it's like everybody's a winner but i' I've had several startups and I truly believe that we have a really perfect team right now so on the right here this is Anne

    00:11:01 par um she sorry that she's not here and this is Eve taii who does the human X plans and there's a whole bunch of advisers and people you could look them up they're all amazing thank you very [Applause] much thank you you talked about a cross- linking process within the procedure what is actually driving that cross-

    00:11:36 linking um diffusion so you have magnetic particles and you have DNA you can also use other ones where the where the particles directly bind to each other but in solution the particles are brought together with a magnetic field and then you have DNA that shorts so if you seem to know about this so you have strep div encoded beads and biotinated DNA and so

    00:12:06 the length of the DNA then determines how quickly the cross Linker attaches to the already formed fibers so you have like a two component mix that's on the table there you inject it you quickly form the fibers through the magnetic field and then sort of the the DNA sort of diffuses on and binds and coats it it's almost like the cat pillar Nest that you see in the trees and then when

    00:12:33 you take off the magnetic field um they're they're flexible but they stay connected are you incorporating nerve growth factors into the uh Matrix that you're injecting we haven't done that yet but that's in the pattern and in the plan so we have worked with bioactive molecules which is a catchall term but there was a paper from uh St and other others from Northwestern University a

    00:13:02 year and a half ago that make a big splash so they're they're very popular right now and we're working on that with Princeton and and Minnesota to to show that in in animalis uh there's been a lot of research suggesting that uh nerve stimulation or electrical stimulation is critical to uh get a functioning conduit as opposed to just an anatomical conduit have you uh been working with that as

    00:13:28 well not yet so I it's you asking exactly the right thing so it it's known even if you reconnect it's it's sort of understood that about 10% reconnection is enough plasticity for the for the body to try to make something work and you're never going to be perfect but you may regain bladder function and and maybe even some gate

    00:13:53 and so the quinee papers that came out last year from electrical stimulation they're amazing papers so so Rehabilitation and electrical stimulation once you have some connection they can really embellish it and make it stronger and and hopefully greatly increase the functionality again you mentioned uh time is spine so what is the time from injury to repair

    00:14:28 how much time do you have and also you mentioned the stem cells how long does it take to grow and amplify those stem cells that's a very good question the process to make the stem cells right now is about 3 to four weeks initially we thought we focus on accute spinal cord injury because you have the scar formation and we thought avoiding the scar gives you the ability

    00:14:54 to create more function now talking with other people um Anar E from tlav Martin Schwab they say it's not that critical so you have a Subacute phase that it starts maybe two to three weeks after the initial injury and then you have a relatively long phase it's like when you have a a wound it it remodels itself for months and so the scar formation is not a dead end roadblock that we initially

    00:15:24 thought so the time would be very compatible with the process to make these St C and finally what we thought was a difficult propo proposal to use for chronic injury you probably don't have to do a deedman so people initially said you so the competitors they have to they make a fresh cut like on a sausage or a Christmas tree and then they put in this

    00:15:48 this scaffold just to have a raw but but that may not be necessary so it seems we can we can do acute maybe Subacute and chronic great thank you do thank you [Applause]