Firms Collaborate In Spine Fusion Product

A Belgium company, Bone Therapeutics, SA, and a company from France, Kasios, are collaborating to develop a product for use in spinal fusion procedures.

The collaboration combines Bone Therapeutics allogeneic (meaning cells taken from a healthy universal donor rather than from the patient) osteoblastic cell therapy product called Allob with Kasios’s synthetic micro-granules bone substitute. The government of the Walloon region of Belgium is subsidizing the project.

The officials of both companies believe that the combined product offering will create a novel approach to spine fusion. They identify three essential properties required for bone fusion.

• Osteoconduction, when bone graft material serves as a support for new bone growth;
• Osteoinduction, in which immature cells are recruited and stimulated to develop into bone-forming cells or osteoblasts and
• Osteogenesis, the production of new bone.

Osteoconduction, they believe, is particularly key in spine fusion procedures, where larger fracture areas create a need for more structural support, something that Kasios’ micro-granules can provide.

Bone Therapeutics CEO Enrico Bastianelli said of the partnership, “We are excited by the collaboration with Kasios which positions both companies at the forefront of development into an innovative new approach to spine fusion. Kasios is a leader in synthetic bone substitutes and we look forward to what we hope will be a very fruitful collaboration as we seek to advance novel solutions for spine fusion.”

Nicolas Guéna, CEO of Kasios, was equally laudatory. “We are delighted to be collaborating with Bone Therapeutics and we believe there are significant synergies between our approaches, ” he said. “By combining our bone substitute with Allob, we aim to benefit from increased bone regeneration efficacy, while our technology provides superior 3-D support for new bone formation.”