SAMARTHAKRUPA LIFESCIENCES PRIVATE LIMITED

In their own words

Development of Autologous Regenerative Therapy for Degenerative Intervertebral Disc Disease Project Summary: Low back pain due to degeneration/herniation of intervertebral disc is very common and is a major health problem resulting in significant disability as well as economic burden world over. It causes both axial pain and limb symptoms from neurological compression. Disc herniation is accompanied by severe tissue degeneration due to loss of cellularity. Therefore, regeneration of annulus fibrosus and nucleus pulposus tissue is of considerable interest. Surgical removal (discectomy) of the herniated part of the disc is one of the options for the pain relief till date. At present all the removed disc tissue is discarded during surgical procedures.Our preliminary in vitro work has shown that viable cells both annulus fibrosus and nucleus pulposus can be harvested from this herniated disc tissue. Moreover, our clinical work has shown that a platelet rich fibrin plug introduced into the disc has no adverse effects and may be helpful in the healing of the disc.Further, in vitro studies have shown that the doubling times of the cells recovered from herniated disc fragments are shorter in the presence of autologous platelet rich fibrin. Also, histology of the disc tissue incubated with platelet rich fibrin shows increased number of viable cells in the tissue. As a natural extension of this series of our work we would like to investigate the culture of the disc tissue removed during surgery in autologous serum and platelets and how this biomaterial along with autologous tissue material can be translated into autologous regenerative therapy for the repair of the disc is the main focus of this proposal.We are interested in studying autologous platelet rich fibrin and intervertebral disc tissue that could help to enhance repair and regeneration of degenerated discs which could further be translated into clinical studies as we have found that the use of platelet rich fibrin following discectomy, which is a very cost effective procedure, remarkably improves the function of the tissue and reduces pain. In particular, we will focus on the development of a therapeutic product using a combination of autologous platelet rich fibrin enriched with autologous disc tissue cells to provide an alternative strategy for patients undergoing discectomy. As far as we are aware such a combination of using autologous growth factors, growth medium (autologous serum) and autologous disc material has not been done so far whereas the advantages of these individually are available and our in vitro experience of combination of these has been very encouraging and the present work may contribute to reducing this disability by offering a biological solution.The present study for the first time looks at a strategy of using autologous cells from the herniated disc fragments that are any way removed and discarded through priming using autologous material only and reimplanting the cells. This may be more cost effective than use of artificial implants most of which are imported. This is an entirely new strategy that is being explored. Considering the various implant strategies and products in the pipeline and already in the market, it is a potential commercially viable tool with several advantages in which native tissue is primed by autologous agents only.This may provide us an opportunity of developing an indigenous biological solution and through exploration of possible IP rights, the process may result in valuable earnings.

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