“Name one regenerative medicine product or company that’s out there that actually truly regenerates anything. Not, ‘we grow keratinocytes,’ or ‘we can turn a cell into an osteogenic lineage’ but really; does this grow full thickness tissue? There’s really not one out there and there’s certainly not one that’s being used clinically right now for skin regeneration.” Challenges Denver Lough, an M.D/Ph.D., now CEO and CSO of PolarityTE.
There are tons of fancy tools for repairing skin out there- ranging from 3D bioprinting, scaffolds and matrices to spray guns that rain stem cells directly onto a wound. Doctors in Brazil are even experimenting with sterilized Tilapia fish skin as a novel dressing for burns. Creativity is nice, but that alone won’t save patients battling through the most critical hours of their lives.
Biotechs working in this field have zoomed in on individual cells, working to culture and manipulate stem cells or to find the right recipe for growth factors that can guide differentiation. That’s not how biology works, though; it works through cells interacting with each other, having gradients, having interfaces, having polarity. A cell needs to know what way is up, what way is down, when you pull a single cell out
of a tissue and try to command it to go down a pathway, you negate all of those factors. The cells need to know what pathways their neighbors are expressing.And this is exactly what PolarityTE is up to- It will relocate you, your family, and your house. Its first product, for skin regeneration, starts with just a small piece of healthy skin taken from a patient with extensive burns. The sample is shipped to the company’s facility in Salt Lake City, Utah, where it is processed into a paste to cover the wound. The paste contains so-called Minimally Polarized Functional Units (MPFUs) that instinctively organize and propagate to help heal a wound. The turnaround time is just 24-48 hours and the use of the patient’s own tissue obviates the risk of immune rejection.
With this new take on an old skin graft approach, PolarityTE aims to capture the diversity of the tissue ecosystem, with epidermal, dermal, and hypodermal cells, fibroblasts, hair follicles — even the structural organization and blood vessel integration seen in the natural skin.
Within the first few months of this year, PolarityTE has transitioned businesses, attracted new investors, and upgraded the board of directors. The end result is a stock price that has rewarded shareholders. At $14, the stock already trades down from a high of nearly $19 only a few trading days back.
Of note, the start-up’s technology pays special attention to the edges of the wound where the real healing occurs, “it’s not a single cell that jumps between the margins,” Lough said. It would be a mistake, however, to place PolarityTE in the bucket of skin grafts only. Lough hopes the technology can go much further, to regenerate and restore bone, muscle, fascia, cartilage, and nerve tissues.
