[December 28, 2017] |
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Stem Cell Leaders Join Frequency Therapeutics' PCA™ Regenerative Medicine Scientific Advisory Board
Frequency
Therapeutics, a clinical stage biotechnology company, today
announced the formation and appointment of its PCA™ Regenerative
Medicine Scientific Advisory Board.
"We are spearheading the movement to harness the body's innate
regenerative potential with our Progenitor Cell Activation (PCA™)
platform that we are calling 'PCA Regeneration'. As our lead program for
hearing regeneration advances on schedule, we are pleased to formally
acknowledge the input from the world's leading stem cell and
regenerative medicine experts who are guiding both our hearing program
and additional therapeutic opportunities for our PCA Regeneration
platform. These men and women share in our vision for developing a new
generation of regenerative medicines that reduce the complexity of
traditional techniques with a simpler and faster approach to treating
disease," said Frequency's CEO David Lucchino.
This new era of PCA regenerative medicine utilizes small molecules
locally administered to stimulate dormant cells in the body's niche
micro-environment to address biological deficits and restore healthy
tissue, without the complexity of cell and gene therapy. This novel
approach has the potential to yield a whole new category of
disease-modifying therapeutics for a wide range of conditions.
Frequency has brought together world-renowned scientists and researchers
with extensive expertise in the fields of stem cell biology and
regenerative medicine. The PCA Regenerative Medicine SAB will guide and
support Frequency's leadership in advancing a next-generation approach
to regenerative medicine with the potential to fully realize the power
of the body's own repair capabilities.
The Board members include:
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Sean Morrison, Ph.D., Director of the Children's Medical Center
Research Institute (CRI (News - Alert)), UT Southwestern, the Mary McDermott Cook
Chair in Pediatric Genetics, the Kathryne and Gene Bishop
Distinguished Chair in Pediatric Research, and a Howard Hughes (News - Alert) Medical
Institute Investigator
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Siddhartha Mukherjee, M.D., D.Phil., Assistant Professor of Medicine
at Columbia University, Pulitzer Prize winning author
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Lee Rubin, Ph.D., Professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology at
Harvard University, Director of Translational Medicine at the Harvard
Stem Cell Institute
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Amy Wagers, Ph.D., the Forst Family Professor of Stem Cell and
Regenerative Biology at Harvard University
"Recent decades have seen the dawn of innovative medical technologies
such as gene editing, gene therapy, and siRNA, each of which has brought
us closer to treating and curing innumerable genetic diseases," said Dr.
Rubin. "But, in just the last decade, biologists have come to realize
the possibility that natural progenitors, already existing in many human
tissues, including muscle and brain, can be mobilized to maintain or
restore tissue function. It is this new frontier of medicine and its
promise which has motivated me to join Frequency's advisory board, and
to help guide the Company's mission to develop its PCA technology as a
whole new, potentially safer and simpler approach to treating disease."
"We are honored to welcome this esteemed group of individuals to help
steer Frequency's scientific direction towards ground-breaking
discoveries i multiple disease indications through the use of small
molecules to activate the body's repair processes," said Chris Loose,
Ph.D., Co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Frequency.
"Frequency's work in the field of Progenitor Cell Activation is leading
the charge on the next-generation of regenerative medicine in which
target cells in the body are activated on demand to restore or create
healthy tissue. We look forward to the insights and guidance from our
advisors as we work to rapidly expand our pipeline beyond hearing loss,
such as alopecia, and muscle repair."
The Frequency Therapeutics Regenerative Medicine Scientific Advisory
Board:
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Sean J. Morrison, Ph.D., is the Director of the Children's
Medical Center Research Institute (CRI) at UT Southwestern, the Mary
McDermott Cook Chair in Pediatric Genetics, the Kathryne and Gene
Bishop Distinguished Chair in Pediatric Research, and a Howard Hughes
Medical Institute Investigator. The Morrison laboratory studies the
cellular and molecular mechanisms that regulate the function of stem
cells and cancer cells in the nervous and hematopoietic systems. His
laboratory is particularly interested on the mechanisms that regulate
stem cell self-renewal and stem cell aging, as well as the role these
mechanisms play in cancer. He is a former President of the
International Society for Stem Cell Research (2015).
*Dr.
Morrison is a paid outside consultant and has investment
interest/options in Frequency Therapeutics, Inc.
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Siddhartha Mukherjee, M.D., D.Phil., is a physician,
oncologist, and author best known for his 2010 book, The Emperor of
All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. He studied biology at Stanford
University, obtained a D.Phil. from University of Oxford where he was
a Rhodes Scholar, and an M.D. from Harvard University. A trained
hematologist and oncologist, Dr. Mukherjee's research focuses on the
links between normal stem cells and cancer cells and his lab is known
for its discovery of skeletal stem cells. Since 2009, Mukherjee has
been an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Columbia University
Medical Center in New York City. He has been the Plummer Visiting
Professor at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, the Joseph
Garland lecturer at the Massachusetts Medical Society, and an honorary
visiting professor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Dr. Mukherjee
has been published in Cell, Nature Medicine and the New
England Journal of Medicine.
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Lee Rubin, Ph.D., is Professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative
Biology at Harvard University and Director of Translational Medicine
at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. He received his Ph.D. in
Neuroscience from The Rockefeller University and completed
postdoctoral fellowships in Pharmacology from Harvard Medical School
and in Neurobiology from Stanford University School of Medicine. Dr.
Rubin has a broad experience in both academia and industry,
particularly in the realms of cell-based assays and drug discovery.
Prior to coming to Harvard, he was Chief Scientific Officer of Curis,
Inc., a Cambridge-based biotechnology company, where his group
identified the first small molecule regulators of the hedgehog
signaling pathway. One of these molecules was developed by
Genentech/Roche and is now an approved cancer treatment (Erivedge).
The Rubin Laboratory focuses on translational, high-throughput
research to model disease and develop drugs using stem cells.
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Amy Wagers, Ph.D., is the Forst Family Professor of Stem
Cell and Regenerative Biology at Harvard University, Senior
Investigator in the Section on Islet Cell and Regenerative Biology at
the Joslin Diabetes Center, and a member of the Paul F. Glenn
Laboratories for the Biological Mechanisms of Aging at Harvard Medical
School. Dr. Wagers received her Ph.D. in Immunology and Microbial
Pathogenesis from Northwestern University, and completed postdoctoral
training in stem cell biology at Stanford University. Dr. Wagers'
research seeks to understand how changes in stem cell activity impact
tissue homeostasis and repair throughout life. Work from the Wagers
Laboratory provides evidence for the existence of a conserved systemic
regulatory axis that modulates tissue maintenance and regenerative
potential in an age-dependent manner and her ongoing studies have
begun to identify key signaling molecules responsible for this
regulation.
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Chris Loose, Ph.D. is the Co-founder and Chief Scientific
Officer of Frequency Therapeutics. Dr. Loose co-founded Semprus
BioSciences and served as Chief Technology Officer through the
company's acquisition in 2012. In 2011, he was awarded the inaugural
Peter Strauss Entrepreneurial Award from the Hertz Foundation. He is
currently an Adjunct Associate Professor of Urology in the Yale School
of Medicine.
ABOUT PCA™ REGENERATION Frequency's precise and controlled
approach transiently causes Lgr5+ progenitor cells to divide and
differentiate, much like what is seen in naturally regenerating tissues
such as the skin and intestine. Frequency activates 'stemness' through
mimicking signals provided by neighboring cells (the stem cell niche)
with small molecules, and this proprietary approach is known as the
Progenitor Cell Activation (PCA™) Regeneration platform. Frequency
believes that PCA Regeneration has the potential to yield a whole new
category of disease-modifying therapeutics for a wide range of
degenerative conditions. To fuel its drug discovery programs, Frequency
is leveraging a PCA screening platform using primary human cells,
including cochlear progenitor cells and adult human progenitor cells
from the GI tract. Potential applications include hearing loss, skin
disorders and gastrointestinal.
ABOUT FREQUENCY THERAPEUTICS Frequency Therapeutics develops
small molecule drugs to stimulate cells in the body to reverse
biological deficits and restore healthy tissue. Through the transitory
activation of these cells, Frequency enables disease modification
without the complexity of genetic engineering. Our breakthrough therapy
uses a proprietary combination of small-molecule drugs that induce
dormant progenitor cells to multiply and create new cells. Our platform
technology is founded on discoveries in progenitor cell biology by Bob
Langer, Sc.D. at MIT (News - Alert) and Jeff Karp, Ph.D., at Harvard, with
contributions from Xiaolei Yin, Ph.D. and other members of the Karp Lab
at Harvard and Brigham & Women's Hospital. www.frequencytx.com.
View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20171228005082/en/
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