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Stem Cell Leaders Join Frequency Therapeutics' PCA™ Regenerative Medicine Scientific Advisory Board
[December 28, 2017]

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:

  • 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
  • Siddhartha Mukherjee, M.D., D.Phil., Assistant Professor of Medicine at Columbia University, Pulitzer Prize winning author
  • Lee Rubin, Ph.D., Professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology at Harvard University, Director of Translational Medicine at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute
  • 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:

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.


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