Advances in medicine have provided breakthroughs in so many areas but one area where progress has been slow has been in treating spinal cord injuries.Now New Haven bioscience startup ReNetX Bio is offering a ray of hope.“Ray” is the key concept here; there is no suggestion of a cure.While ReNetX Bio’s NoGo Trap therapeutic has […]
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Advances in medicine have provided breakthroughs in so many areas but one area where progress has been slow has been in treating spinal cord injuries.
Now New Haven bioscience startup ReNetX Bio is offering a ray of hope.
“Ray” is the key concept here; there is no suggestion of a cure.
While ReNetX Bio’s NoGo Trap therapeutic has been given “fast track” status by the Food and Drug Administration, the firm’s mission statement is clear and precise: “to boldly advance first-in-class therapeutics for people living with currently incurable neurological disorders.”
The science comes from the lab of the firm founder, Dr. Steve Strittmatter. He’s the Vincent Coates Professor of Neurology and co-founded the Yale Program in Cellular Neuroscience, Neurodegeneration and Repair. His NoGo Trap blocks inhibitors in the central nervous system thereby allowing the body to repair itself by re-growing nerve fiber connections.
The injected therapeutic has shown promise in primates leading to a rare human trial using patients with chronic spinal cord injuries. Human trials are expensive, and the early stages are taking place at six sites with an undisclosed number of participants.
Dr. Crista Adamson knows both the science and patient experience. She suffered a spinal cord injury at the age of 20 and has been moving through life in a wheelchair for 35 years. She earned her Ph.D. at Rutgers and has been involved in spinal cord research for decades. Today she’s the director of clinical engagement at ReNetX.
She knows well the stages of dealing with a spinal cord injury and her insights guide the firm’s march through early-stage human trials that will establish the safety and optimum dosing of the product.
Hope is relative and is measured in incremental progress, she says — an extra degree of motion here, an extra bit of hand strength there.
She says she has seen too many trials overpromise. This won’t be one of those.
She describes Strittmatter as “a rock star” in the field. In February, he was awarded the King Faisal Prize for Medicine for his work on the NoGo receptor pathway.
But ReNetX isn’t pure science. It’s designed as a business and that’s the province of CEO Erika Smith. Her background includes launching three venture funds and co-authoring a book on empowering women entrepreneurs.
She points to early funding support from the Wings of Life Foundation. So far, ReNetX has raised about $30 million, including a $3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health. But, if the therapeutic passes early clinical testing, a move to the commercialization phase will require finding a deep-pocketed partner, she acknowledges.
There are about 300,000 spinal cord patients in the U.S. but the therapeutic also could improve life for 3 million glaucoma patients suffering from diabetic retinopathy. That’s the next hurdle for ReNetX.
Today, a staff of 20 works on advancing NoGo Trap through the FDA trials process. Smith points to a supportive and collaborative New Haven ecosystem as a valuable asset in ReNetX’s progress.
