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Type 1 diabetes (T1D), formerly known as juvenile diabetes, is a chronic, life-threatening disease that affects millions of people worldwide. In the United States, 30,000 new cases are estimated every year with half of those cases diagnosed in young children. Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease in which the patient`s immune system goes awry and attacks and destroys the pancreatic beta cells. Beta cells are responsible for regulating blood sugar (glucose) levels by producing precise amounts of the essential hormone insulin. The discovery of injectable insulin in the 1920s changed T1D from a uniformly fatal disease with a life expectancy of months to one that could be carefully managed for decades through multiple daily blood glucose measurements and insulin injections. However, insulin injections are not a cure and patients face a lifetime of difficult disease management and serious complications including kidney failure, blindness and nerve damage. Despite nearly a century passing since the discovery of insulin, insulin injection remains the only treatment available to patients. Semma Therapeutics was founded to develop transformative therapies for patients who currently depend on insulin injections. Recent work in the laboratory of Professor Douglas Melton led to the discovery of a method to generate billions of functional, insulin-producing beta cells in the laboratory. These cells develop in islet-like clusters grown from stem cells. Initial preclinical work in animal models of diabetes has shown that transplantation of these cells are sufficient to control blood glucose levels. This breakthrough technology has been exclusively licensed to Semma Therapeutics for the development of a cell-based therapy for diabetes. Ongoing research at Semma Therapeutics is focused on combining these proprietary cells with a state-of-the-art cell delivery and immune protection strategy that can protect these cells from the patient`s immune system and allow the beta cells to function as they do in non-diabetic individuals. Implantation of the beta cell-filled device has the potential to provide a true replacement for the missing beta cells in a diabetic patient and would not require patient immunosuppression. Semma Therapeutics is working to bring this new therapeutic option to the clinic and improve the lives of patients with diabetes.
Deltagen is a San Mateo, CA-based company in the Healthcare, Pharmaceuticals, and Biotech sector.
ITOCHU Chemicals America is a White Plains, NY-based company in the Healthcare, Pharmaceuticals, and Biotech sector.
MicuRx mission is to discover and develop safer and more convenient antibiotics to combat drug-resistant bacterial infections. Multi-drug resistant (MDR) infections represent a major global threat to the public health, routinely forcing the use of antibiotics with high incidence of adverse effects. To combat resistant infections, physicians may increase dosing of antibiotics, or resort to less safe agents, pushing the safety envelope. Thus, healthcare providers and regulatory agencies increasingly face a difficult choice of balancing the risk of infection against unacceptably high adverse event rates from an effective but relatively toxic antibiotic. For example, in July 2016, FDA imposed a new labeling warning on the toxicity of fluoroquinolones, further restricting the use of this essential class, exemplified by anti-pseudomonal agent ciprofloxacin. Anti-MRSA agent linezolid (Zyvox®) is often used beyond its approved 14-day therapy, resulting in several myelosuppression-associated adverse effects listed in the black box warning for this important drug. MicuRx is addressing the critical need for effective but safer therapeutics by designing novel new compounds with reduced toxicity and adverse events while maintaining excellent clinical efficacy.
4C Medical Technologies, Inc. is a medical device company developing a novel minimally invasive solution for the treatment of mitral regurgitation (MR).