Additional Funding Awarded for Regenerative Cartilage Therapy Development

Mogrify has announced that it has secured $1.1M of
additional funding from SBRI Healthcare, the NHS England funded initiative
championed by the Academic Health Science Network (AHSN), to assess its
regenerative cartilage therapy, for the treatment of cartilage defects,
osteoarthritis and other musculoskeletal conditions, before entering clinical
trials. This grant follows on from the Phase I funding announced earlier this year,
which enabled Mogrify to identify the transcription factors and culture
conditions required to convert various cell types into healthy mature
chondrocytes, using Mogrify’s data-driven direct cellular conversion
technology.

The Mogrify platform is designed to take a
systematic big-data approach to identify, from next-generation sequencing and
gene-regulatory networks, the conversion factors needed to produce cells that
exhibit safety, efficacy and scalable manufacturing profiles suitable for
development as regenerative cell therapies. The cellular conversions developed
by Mogrify aim to allow both the scalable production of chondrocytes in vitro
for use in autologous and allogeneic chondrocyte implantation for cartilage
defects, and an in vivo reprogramming therapy to reverse the pathophysiology of
osteoarthritis. The Phase II funding from SBRI will be used to progress these
cell conversions through pre-clinical safety and efficacy studies in vivo.

Pierre-Louis Joffrin, Corporate Development
Executive, Mogrify, said: “Osteoarthritis is the most common joint disorder and
with current treatments focused only on addressing the symptoms, there is a
huge unmet medical need. Through this additional funding from the NHS England
initiative, we will be able to take the project through the efficacy and safety
studies necessary to see it make a difference to patients as we now start
planning for the clinical stages of the development.”