New York regenerative medicine startup EpiBone‘s tagline is apt: “Grow your own bone.”
It uses a patient’s own stem cells to create transplantable, highly personalized bone grafts, going after a 900,000-strong market of patients that need some variety of bone graft to treat, say, severe bone trauma, growth defects or genetic disorders.
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The company is showcased as one of TedMed’s 2014 Hive startups. CEO Nina Tandon has actually given a couple of great TED talks on caring for engineered tissue and using it to advance personalized medicine.
So here’s how EpiBone works: Using a scan of the patient’s bone defect, EpiBone manipulates the patient’s stem cells to grow a mass of bone that can be grafted back into the patient. The general plan here is to offer surgeons a simpler grafting method that reduces recovery time by sidestepping complications associated with synthetic implants. And since it’s a graft of patients’ own cells, they won’t have the same issues with transplant rejection that can be a plague.
“EpiBone’s living, anatomically-precise, patient-specific bone grafts are engineered for a perfect fit, and integrate with their skeleton without a need for a second surgery,” Tandon told TedMed. “We want to help people preserve their bodies for a longer, higher quality of life.”
The company was launched in 2012, based on more than a decade of research at Columbia University. In its earliest stages, EpiBone is operating off a BioAccelerate grant prize from the NYC Partnership Fund. It has also received funding from Breakout Labs, a Peter Thiel-backed nonprofit fund.
Mild departure into nerd-dom: There was something in the Harry Potter series about this. School nurse Madam Pomfrey had a potion called Skele-Gro that would allow a patient to regrow bones. This smacks of a case of life imitating art, no?