Bioheart Licenses Cell Patent
Deal with Cleveland Clinic focuses on repairing heart tissue.
Bioheart said Monday it signed a patent-licensing deal with the Cleveland Clinic to develop the clinic’s stem-cell-based technology for repairing tissue damaged by a heart attack.
The agreement provides Bioheart with exclusive worldwide rights to five pending U.S. patent applications and the corresponding foreign filings related to the treatment.
The clinic has developed a way to transplant stem cells from a patient’s thigh muscle to the damaged region of the patient’s heart. Those cells are able to recruit other stem cells to help rebuild tissue and increase the formation of blood vessels.
“We’re trying to treat heart failure patients and patients who have had a heart attack,” said Jason Griffeth, senior business development and advanced R&D associate at Bioheart. “Right now their options are limited in terms of being able to recover the damaged regions of their hearts.”
He declined to provide the financial terms of the deal. The Sunrise, Florida-based company hopes to be able to market the technology to hospitals and interventional cardiologists once the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approves the new protocol.
The technology is being tested at five clinical sites in the United States and 17 in Europe, according to Scott Bromley, vice president of marketing at Bioheart.
Human Trials on the Way
Dr. Marc Penn of the cardiovascular medicine and cell biology departments at the Cleveland Clinic has already conducted animal studies on the first product for which Bioheart plans to file an investigational new drug application with the FDA in order to begin human clinical trials.
“I look forward to working with their team to move these cell-based technologies forward to the clinic and to the many patients that may potentially benefit from them,” he said.
With the technology, doctors will be able to take a muscle biopsy from a patient’s thigh muscle to help reconstruct the damaged heart tissue.
“We send it to our laboratory, where we break it down and select out the immature muscle stem cells,” said Mr. Griffeth. “These muscle stem cells have a blueprint basically to become muscle, but they don’t necessarily know what type of muscle they want to become.”
The thigh cells are able to repair a damaged thigh muscle, but the heart cells don’t have that same capability on their own. By placing the thigh muscle cells into the damaged heart tissue, they are able to perform that same rebuilding function in the heart.
Bioheart also wants to improve the Cleveland Clinic’s technology by improving the cell composition. “We’re going to modify our heart cells to express proteins that serve to recruit stem cells from the patient into that area to further assist in repairing that tissue,” said Mr. Griffeth.
Bioheart is a privately held company started in June 1999. It’s backed by angel investors and some small venture capital firms. Investors include New World Angels, Advent Morrow Equity Partners, ASTRI Group, Magellan Group, Presidential Capital Partners, and Minnesota Biomed Partners.
