A Boston-area bioscaffolding startup is creating a way to mimic natural tissue that also incorporates targeted drug delivery – with aims to create vascular piping that helps treat disease of the arteries, heart and kidney.
NuVascular Technologies, a Boston-area nanotechnology company, incorporates the drugs directly into the “electrospun” fibers that make up the fake tissue, releasing medication at a steady rate over the course of two months or more. This is an improvement in terms of duration and potency over the standard of care in cardiac and kidney disease, the company said.
Like many bioscaffolding companies, NuVascular’s baseline product naturally mimics the natural framework upon which human tissue grows. The company gives its example of the differences between your run-of-the-mill bioscaffolding with the electrospun material below:
The technology was developed over the course of a decade with $6.6 million in NIH funding, and the startup’s an offshoot of BioSurfaces – the company that developed this new bioscaffolding approach. NuVascular shares a building and a core team with BioSurfaces, but is positioned to create the disease-specific devices, such as artificial blood vessels, hemodialysis catheters and cardiac repair materials.
NuVascular says it’s still in talks with the Food and Drug Administration to get approval for these devices.
