| Name | Title | Contact Details |
|---|
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.
NDD Medical Technologies is a Andover, MA-based company in the Healthcare, Pharmaceuticals, and Biotech sector.
Aptinyx Inc. (formerly Naurex Inc.) is a biopharmaceutical company focused on discovery and development of transformative therapies for challenging disorders of the brain and nervous system. Aptinyx has a proven platform for discovering compounds that enhance synaptic plasticity, or strengthen the network for neural cell communication. Molecules discovered by Aptinyx achieve this through a novel mechanism that modulates NMDA receptors, resulting in drugs that are both highly effective and well tolerated. This mechanism has applicability across a number of brain and nervous system disorders. Aptinyx is rapidly advancing promising drug candidates into clinical development for indications with high unmet medical need.
Immunicom, Inc. is a privately held medical technology company that develops subtractive therapies for cancer, autoimmune disorders, and inflammatory and renal diseases. Immunicom`s blood-filtering Immunopheresis technology has the potential to effectively treat a wide variety of cancer types and other terminal diseases with a safer side-effect profile than conventional treatments. Immunicom`s lead product, the LW-02 column, previously received FDA Breakthrough Device designation in 2018 for stage IV metastatic cancer, and European regulatory clearance (CE Mark certification) in 2021 for use in adults with advanced, refractory, triple negative breast cancer. Immunopheresis is being evaluated in several global oncology trials for multiple cancers. Immunicom is headquartered in San Diego, CA with operations in Houston, TX, Philadelphia, PA, Krakow, Poland, and Istanbul, Turkey.
Cue Biopharma™ is an innovative immunotherapy company developing a novel, proprietary class of biologics engineered to selectively modulate the human immune system to treat a broad range of cancers and autoimmune disorders. We design biologics to engage and modulate the activity of disease-associated T cells in the patient`s body, offering significant therapeutic advantages while potentially minimizing or eliminating unwanted side effects. We believe our biologics allow us to target antigen-specific T cell populations in a variety of indications using a simple peptide exchange within previously-validated drug frameworks developed from the Cue Biologics Platform™. This flexibility could truncate the drug selection and development process, moving effective therapeutics from discovery to clinical validation more rapidly and cost efficiently than current industry standard timelines and costs. Headquartered in Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA, we are led by an experienced management team and scientific and clinical advisory board (SAB/CAB) with deep expertise in the design and clinical development of protein biologics, immunology and immuno-oncology.