Renovos wins Innovate UK’s Biomedical Catalyst funding!

Injectable Renovite gel for localised tissue regeneration

Renovos has been awarded a £692,472 Biomedical Catalyst grant from Innovate UK, the UK’s innovation agency*. Innovate UK funds businesses to accelerate promising innovations towards commercially successful products, in specific areas of interest that promote economic growth.

Musculoskeletal conditions are the leading contributor to disability worldwide, with the most common and disabling conditions such as arthritis, back and neck pain, fractures and injuries. Current bone healing agents are poorly localised and rely on very high doses which have been associated with some dangerous side effects such as excess bone growth outside of the skeleton, inflammation leading to tissue swelling and sometimes nerve damage when used in the spine.

Renovos provides a novel solution that can address the current limitations of localising bone agents/biologic factors at the site of repair, improving their safety and efficacy. RENOVITE® is injectable and enables the use of bone-healing agents in a more precise, localised manner, and – thanks to strong retention – at a significantly reduced dose. Renovos’ compelling pre-clinical data shows that these agents are only released upon contact with regenerating cells, so they can enhance healing in a more targeted manner to improve outcomes with greater safety, efficacy and at a lower cost. The project “RENOVITE® – regenerative nanoclay for orthobiologic applications” will deliver further pre-clinical development in models aligned with clinical applications and accelerate the regulatory path.

Agnieszka Janeczek, CEO of Renovos Biologics said: “We are thrilled that our RENOVITE® nanoclay gel technology has once again been recognised by the Innovate UK experts. As pioneers of nanoclay gels for tissue regeneration, we are excited about this funding and the progress in development it will allow us to achieve to get closer to the clinic.”

Renovos ultimately anticipates its products based on the RENOVITE® platform will provide novel solutions for bone fusion procedures and difficult to treat fractures, benefiting the increasingly active younger demographics, requiring tissue regeneration, as well as the progressively ageing population.

If you are interested in supporting Renovos’ vision, please get in touch. 

 

* Innovate UK drives productivity and economic growth by supporting businesses to develop and realise the potential of new ideas. We connect businesses to the partners, customers and investors that can help them turn ideas into commercially successful products and services and business growth. We fund business and research collaborations to accelerate innovation and drive business investment into R&D. Our support is available to businesses across all economic sectors, value chains and UK regions. Innovate UK is part of UK Research and Innovation. For more information visit www.innovateuk.ukri.org

How Renovite nanoclays open up new opportunities in regenerative medicine

nanoclay injected into spine

For anyone pioneering a new technology in regenerative medicine, it’s not long before you are asked what it is that sets your tech apart from the rapidly growing number of other competing technologies out there. It’s an important question because, like many areas of exciting opportunity, the research field of regenerative medicine has experienced explosive growth over the last couple of decades.

I think it is important to understand, however, what has driven this growth. Technological growth sometimes happens because new enabling innovations have come about which mean solutions that were, before, technically very challenging or even impossible, have suddenly become much more possible. Think of the tantalising medical possibilities of AI or CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing, for example. In this case an explosion of innovation occurs because something that was previously very hard has become (or, at least, appears to have become) considerably easier and more accessible.

Other times, almost the mirror image applies. Innovation happens because a compelling opportunity we originally thought to be within reach, turns out to be rather more elusive than we first imagined. In this situation, while the power of the idea continues to attract innovators and entrepreneurs, new technologies arise because earlier efforts at realising the potential opportunity fall short.

The innovative drive around regenerative medicine and biologics would seem to fall into this second category. The simple concept at the heart of regenerative medicine – that by activating the potential of stem cells we can regenerate diseased and damaged tissues – may have proven to be harder than we first thought, but the idea lives on and continues to inspire new concepts and technologies.

Renovite nanoclay provides, we believe, an elegantly simple and low-cost enabling technology with real potential to unlock the long-awaited promise of regenerative medicine.

The fundamental challenge facing regenerative medicine has always been the need to bridge the gap between the biological context of the stem cell and the clinical context of adult health care. As increasingly elaborate technologies have been developed to address the demands of biological complexity, the associated increase in cost, regulatory hurdles and technicality has meant that the gap between the stem cell and the clinic has seemed to grow rather than shrink as science has progressed.

Renovite nanoclay has unique potential to bridge this impasse in ways that other technologies have not been able to. The following features stand out:

  • Renovite is synthetic – The mineral formulation of Renovite allows for low-cost manufacture and sterile processing.
  • Renovite is biocompatible – Renovite gels can be degraded by cells and processed by the body.
  • Renovite is versatile – Renovite can be delivered as a gel, applied as a coating, complexed with polymers as a nanocomposite or combined with graft material as a carrier.
  • Renovite is injectable – Renovite spontaneously sets into a stiff gel by complexing with proteins in the blood allowing for minimally invasive outpatient interventions,
  • Renovite is bioactiveRenovite’ s unique gelation properties also serve the complex demands of biology by stabilising a protein-rich environment proven to foster cell invasion and remodelling.
  • Renovite enhances biologicsRenovite’s ability to bind biological molecules allows for dramatic enhancements in efficacy and safety profiles and opens up new applications for delivery of growth factors, drugs and antimicrobials.

 

nanoclay injection

Renovite nanoclay has the potential to make the complex simple and drive new innovations in regenerative medicine. Since pioneering nanoclay gels over a decade ago with our first publication on “Clay gels for the delivery of regenerative microenvironments”, there has been significant growth in the use of nanoclays in biomaterial design. In a 2013 progress report on the opportunities nanoclays present we uncovered only a small handful of studies exploring the use of clay in this context. This review has now itself been cited over 200 times as more research groups have begun working on nanoclay all over the world.

Renovite represents the first clinical grade nanoclay manufactured for biomedical application. These are exciting times for Renovos. By bringing nanoclay to the clinic we hope to see renewed growth in the regenerative medicine sector as new, previously unrealised, opportunities for harnessing the potential of stem cells in healthcare begin to open up.

If you are interested in supporting our vision, please get in touch. 

 

By Jonathan Dawson