Bone Regeneration Focus of New Firm

A former Medtronic, Inc. executive and an Emory University orthopedic surgeon have partnered to form SkelRegen, LLC, a company focused on regenerating human bone and other skeletal tissue. One of the partners, Stephen R. LaNeve, was president of the spinal and biologics division of Minnesota-based Medtronic. The other, Scott D. Boden, M.D., is chief medical officer at the Emory University Orthopaedic & Spine Hospital and a professor of Orthopaedics at Emory University School of Medicine.

As reported by John George in the Philadelphia Business Journal, the two hope to find new approaches to repairing damaged bone, cartilage, ligaments and tendons. Their firm is located in West Chester, Pennsylvania.

As Boden explained, options for surgeons are presently limited to the use of biologically inactive space fillers or expensive recombinant proteins, peptides, and antibodies. With SkelRegen, the two hope to produce safe and less-expensive small molecule treatments that would be capable of regenerating skeletal tissues using the body’s own mechanisms.

“We discovered several small molecules that simply help the body’s own regeneration machinery do its job, ” said Boden, who serves as the company’s chief medical, science and technology officer. “We are basically building bone from scratch now, with the expectation of building cartilage and other soft tissue in the near future.” Boden oversaw the research team, led by Emory Orthopaedics researcher Sreedhara Sangadala that discovered the molecules.