Technologies

JR-100 as a Novel Therapeutic Strategy for Tissue Repair in Chronic Neurodegenerative and Inflammatory Diseases

Overview:
Chronic degenerative diseases are characterized by progressive loss of healthy tissue and concomitant replacement by fibrosis, leading organ dysfunction and failure, and death. Hence current efforts to advance regenerative medicine approaches to prevent or revert structural and functional alterations of tissues through stem cell regenerative therapy. Most existing stem cell clinical trials are based on injection of bone marrow stem cells or autologous stem cells grownex vivo. These trials have had limited success, in part because of the short time (few days) transplanted cells remain in the organ of interest. A better approach would be to administer agent able to expand, migrate, and differentiate stem/progenitor cells. But these agents do not exist. The ones studied have a short life (for example, the half-live of neurotrophinsin vivois less than 1 min), have many side effects (for example, NGF is nociceptive), and can cause autoimmunity. Identifying an exogenous agent that can expand act on resident progenitor cells and trigger their expansion, migration and tissue repair events in disease states is a great need in state-of-the art therapeutic approaches. JR-100 fills this void. The therapeutic benefit of JR-100 intravenous administration in a mouse model of chronic infectious cardiomyopathy is evident at least two months after administration, most likely by boosting growth, migration and differentiation in reparative resident cardiac progenitor cells. In addition, short-term cell survival is caused by direct activation of survival signaling in parenchyma cells via TrkA and TrkC kinase receptors.