This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: the Podcast” is with Craig Atwood, founder and CEO of JangoBio.
The Fitchburg-based company is developing stem cell therapies to treat various diseases and conditions, including one product pipeline aimed at restoring the body’s hormone balance that becomes disrupted through aging.
“So that we can get our hormones back to youthful levels, so that we can mitigate diseases of aging and hopefully get that next 20, 30, 50 years of healthy longevity,” he said. “It’s a very ambitious program, but we are making great progress.”
While the development is still “relatively early on,” the path ahead requires pre-clinical data to get authorization to proceed with human clinical trials. The company has successfully created a stem cell product that produces target hormones, demonstrating its effectiveness in rodent models.
“This essentially means that we can treat what’s known as hypogonadism, that loss of ovarian and testicular hormones that everybody develops as they move through menopause in women and andropause in men,” Atwood said.
After tracking the treated rodents over their lifetimes, the company found an increase of about 33% to healthy longevity.
“This is quite a significant increase in reaching our goal,” he said.
With that proof-of-concept in hand, the next phase involves moving to a larger animal model — namely, dogs. Atwood noted about 90 million dogs live in the United States, and at least 70% of those have been reproductively sterilized, making for a prime research pool.
“We have the capacity to be able to not only generate data that’s required by the FDA to move into a human clinical trial, but we can also meet that market, getting hormones back up to youthful levels in dogs,” he said.
A second stem cell pipeline aims to initially treat osteoarthritis for dogs and eventually in humans as well. This joint disease can cause pain and inflammation, impacting mobility. Treating this condition represents a “quicker way” to start generating revenue to fuel the company’s scientific endeavors, Atwood said.
After treating 21 dogs, the company has seen “dramatic improvements” in both pain levels and mobility for all of the dogs it’s treated.
“It’s been very gratifying to see these dogs go from limping, and not being able to move really well because they’re just really in a lot of pain, to just running toward their owners,” Atwood said.
Listen to the podcast below, sponsored by UW-Madison:
