Regenerative Medicine Start-Up Created out of ORNL

Battelle Ventures has spun out a firm from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), with an initial $1.5 million seed investment. The company, called NellOne Therapeutics, will develop regenerative medicines. The funding will be tranched based on key technical milestones.

Towards a "holy grail" in human medicine: the ability to restore organs damaged through trauma, disease, cancer, or even the normal aging process.

Tissue or organ repair has been the ultimate goal of surgery from ancient times to the present day. Clearly, there is a lot of interest in the regeneration of tissues, and tissue repair in organisms is within reach. However, we are a long way from understanding how to coax the human body into regenerating complex body parts after injury or disease. As an example, regeneration of amputated limbs in amphibians - “epimorphic” regeneration which includes cellular dedifferentiation in the injured tissues of the limb stump and proliferation of these cells to form a distal blastema which undergoes patterning and growth to restore the missing limb structures. Some of the processes that are relatively little known and most of scientists are keen in understanding are:

• Processes involving cell recruitment of progenitor cells to the site of disease or injury and tissue-specific differentiation
• Growth factors and cytokines responsible for activating the body's own native cells to initiate regeneration
• Integration of the regenerated tissue within the surrounding host tissue and true differentiation through pathways involved in embryonic development
• Regulation of expression of a target gene can induce the expression of one or more tissue-inductive factors
• Direct the differentiation of stem or progenitor cells, or remove a factor that inhibits regeneration
• Ability of differentiating cells of muscle and other tissues to lose their ability to revert to the proliferative state and contribute to organ regeneration

Molecular Connections Private Ltd. Bangalore India has come up with its new Knowledgebase of all activating and inhibitory cell surface receptors and their complexes with the ligand(s) determined to date - Receptome:

• Knowledgebase, is a result of manually mining thousands of papers, on functional ligand-receptor pairs with their role & biological significance in developmental biology, as reported in literature till date
• Careful description of cell surface receptors, ligand(s) and molecular pathways integrated into complex networks and their expression patterns (signatures) involved in tissue regeneration
• Completely deciphered pathways of endogenous growth factors and cytokines and their receptors with their regulatory mechanisms involved in tissue regeneration
• Endogenous modulators or regulators of developmental ligand-receptor(s) widely studied in differentiation of stem or progenitor cells or tissue regeneration
• A platform to identify and track stem cells in different culture programmes using expression profiles of markers
• Comprehensive overview of the synergistic and combinatorial effects of receptors in tissue regeneration