Heart failure, Dibete, Parkinson’s disease… Chronic and cardiovascular diseases are the leading causes of death in the world. Thanks to cell therapies, there is now hope for restoring health in patients in patients suffering from these “incurable diseases”. But these innovative therapies are difficult and expensive to manufacture.
The French startup TreeFrog Therapeutics has developed a revolutionary method to mass-produce cell therapies based on pluripotent stem cells. This process, called C-Stem, makes it possible to safely and efficiently scale-up the manufacturing of therapeutic cells, thanks to an encapsulation device capable of generating over 5,000 stem cell capsules per second. Combined with standard bioreactors, this technology has reduced production costs 10-fold and aims to achieve a 100-fold decrease by 2026!
Making cell therapies safer, more effective, more affordable, and accessible to all could change the lives of millions of patients. To deploy this breakthrough innovation the French biotech startup raised over €10 million in 2019. A new fundraising of more than 50 million euros is in preparation for 2021. Already multi-awarded at the French and European level, TreeFrog Therapeutics recently won in the US the 2020 Galien Medstartup Award, which rewards exceptional achievements in science and innovation, for its collaboration with the Dana Farber and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute in Boston.
The startup has great plans for the future: the opening of 2 international hubs (Boston-USA and Kobe-Japan) and a first clinical trial in Parkinson’s disease scheduled for 2024.
