Based on promising results in an early clinical trial, Mayo Clinic has formed a new joint venture with materials engineering firm W.L. Gore & Associates to spearhead a new therapy using stem cells to repair a painful tissue problem stemming from Crohn's disease.
Mayo and Gore on Tuesday announced the formation of a for-profit company called Avobis Bio ("a vobis" is Latin for "by you"), based in Delaware, where Gore is also based. The privately held company will draw on the expertise of scientists at Mayo and Gore to launch a second-phase clinical trial in the hopes of eventually offering the treatment commercially.
A laboratory director at Mayo Clinic said Avobis Bio's therapy, if successful, may be a first-of-its-kind in health care, involving the delivery of a person's own mesenchymal stem cells on a synthetic "scaffold" that biodegrades over time, eventually leaving behind only native tissue sealing a wound. The first application of the technology is treatment of a health problem called perianal fistulae. But if successful, Avobis Bio may one day offer a variety of tissue and organ-repair therapies combining Mayo's stem cell expertise and Gore's medical materials.
"This is a completely new approach, where we are trying to leverage what the body can do for itself," said Allan Dietz, co-director of the Human Cell Therapy Lab in Mayo's Center for Regenerative Medicine.
Mesenchymal stem cells can naturally convert into other kinds of tissue, like muscle or bone. For the Avobis Bio therapy, the cells are harvested from a biopsy of a person's body fat and cultivated at a Mayo laboratory to high purity. No one knows whether the cells deposited into the wound directly convert into scar tissue, or if the stem cells trigger genetic signals that cause other cells in the surrounding tissue to begin the healing process.
"We provide stem cells in the right frame, at the right time, for the body to recognize the signals that it should begin the healing process," Dietz said. "I think in some ways, it was a required simple first step … but it appears to be a major step."
Gore is perhaps best known to the public for its Gore-Tex outerwear, but the privately held $3.7 billion engineering and manufacturing firm sells products in an array of industries, including a line of medical devices designed to repair nonnatural holes in body organs. Mayo has used Gore-made devices for many years.
Several years ago, physician-researchers at the not-for-profit Mayo Clinic in Rochester grew keenly interested in a Gore device called the Bio-A Fistula Plug, a flexible bioabsorbable plug made from a material similar to dissolving stitches.
