GEL4MED
Advancing Tissue Regeneration
Welcome to Gel4Med, the Smart Materials Company paving the way to the future of regenerative medicine. We are a team of like-minded and determined individuals, all holding a shared vision for the betterment of patient outcomes. We believe that our programmable Smart Materials Platform has the potential to dramatically improve the outcomes in tissue regeneration. We set out to change the industry as we know it, and we are doing just that.
SMART MATERIALS PLATFORM
The Gel4Med approach is focused on nano-engineering the extracellular matrix to guide cell and tissue fate.
Current biomaterials for tissue regeneration use a top-down approach that often relies on harvesting donor tissues (animal and human). This expensive strategy results in unacceptable clinical outcomes due in part to the variable quality of donor materials, donor availability, risk of disease transmission, extensive biochemical processing, and donor-host mismatch. In contrast, Gel4Med uses bottom-up engineering approaches with its biosynthetic Smart Materials Platform. This revolutionary platform allows for unprecedented customization, unlocking new potential for therapeutic biomaterials in regenerative medicine.
URGENT CLINICAL NEED
Human skin wounds: a major and snowballing threat to public health and the economy
Wound care management is a significant healthcare burden. In the U.S. alone,15% of Medicare beneficiaries (8.2 million people) alone are impacted by chronic wounds at an estimated annual cost of $28-32 billion.
One case that highlights the shortcomings of currently available wound care products is the treatment of “tunnel and undermining” wounds. Diabetic foot ulcers (DFUs), among other lower extremity wounds, are often found to form tracts or ‘‘tunnels’’ that penetrate deep into soft tissue. 15% of these wounds worsen to involve bones and tendons resulting in osteomyelitis. Such deep tissue wounds have healing rates, as low as 35%, and amputation rates as high as 20%. To further complicate clinical outcomes, tunnel and undermining wounds have a high rate of infection (over 50% for DFUs), which delay healing and increase the risk of lower limb amputation (20% within one year), and even death (68% within 5 years).
Sheet forms skin substitutes are popular and effective for healing surface wounds that are wide and shallow. However, these products do not work in deep tissue/ tunneling/undermining cutaneous wounds due to their depth and irregular shape. Applying sheet-form skin substitutes to these types of wounds creates dead space within the wounds that are prone to infection, promoting seroma and abscess formation. There is an urgent clinical needs for a product that fills and heals deep tissue/tunneling/undermining wounds. To address this need, Gel4Med has developed an novel biosynthetic flowable wound matrix technology based on our Smart Materials Platform.
Developed Technology
Flowable Synthetic Wound Matrix
Gel4Med's Smart Materials Platform is an innovative patent protected self-assembling fiber composition that has been molecularly engineered to simultaneously address the top problems in wound care.
Our first product is a flowable synthetic extracellular matrix that promotes tissue regeneration in surgical, chronic, and combat wounds without the use of any added drugs or biologics. The fibers self-assemble in wounds to form a macromolecular hydrogel that functions as an extracellular scaffolding matrix that promotes wound tissue regeneration. The product components are non-toxic, do not rely on plant or animal products for manufacturing (and thus are free of endotoxins), are biodegradable by hydrolysis and protease break down, and are easy to manufacture and scale up. The self-assembling fibers offer a flexible bio-design, allowing to tune the material's porosity, viscosity, and shear thinning abilities for use in diverse applications critical to solving unmet medical needs in regenerative medicine and bio-surgery.