RAPID
CITY, SD (Feb. 2, 2021) — A South Dakota Mines research team has developed technology –
and established a subsequent startup company – that could be a key to finding a
cure for osteoarthritis.
Scott Wood, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the NanoScience
and NanoEngineering Program,
and Ph.D. student Ram Saraswat lead the research and development of the
nanoscience technology now utilized by their startup, CellField Technologies.
“We’re excited about the potential future of the technology and the company,”
Wood says. “We hope it will be a gamechanger in osteoarthritis research.”
Osteoarthritis,
sometimes called degenerative joint disease, is the most common form of
arthritis. Most often it occurs in the hands, hips and knees. Osteoarthritis
develops when the cartilage within a joint begins to break down, causing pain,
stiffness and swelling. More than 32.5 million adults in the United States
suffer from osteoarthritis, and current treatments offer little more than temporary
pain control, Wood says.
Wood
says that for hundreds of years, doctors have considered osteoarthritis a “wear
and tear disease, but we know now that it’s more complicated … It’s actually an imbalance of the
behavior of the cells in the joint.”
Wood
says CellField’s technology will make it easier to study cartilage cells, called
chondrocytes, the primary cells that cause osteoarthritis, in a lab setting.
“Currently
when cartilage cells are removed from the body to be studied in a traditional 2D
culture system, they are notoriously difficult to work with because they basically
transform into a completely different cell type within a week and a half,” Wood
says. More advanced 3D culture systems prevent this from happening but create
incompatibility with techniques to analyze the cells. “Our technology is meant
to keep those cells behaving in the lab the way they would in the body without
limiting our ability to study their behavior.”
The
technology developed by Wood and Saraswat - a combination of nanotechnology,
micropatterning and “mechanically-tunable” thin-film composite materials - acts
as an “egg crate for individual cells, nesting each one in an environment that
allows it to maintain its physiological nature without restricting their
ability to be studied.” It can “maintain the physiological cell shape of
chondrocytes for at least 28 days, four times as long as competing
micropatterned technologies.”
Wood
says the new technique will allow scientists to evaluate the cartilage cells as
a part of the entire joint, which has multiple types of cells that communicate
with each other. Most research to date involves studying the chondrocytes independently
of the other cells in a joint. Wood’s research uses “traditional and
state-of-the-art genome, proteomic and imaging techniques” to study the cells.
The ultimate goal is a type of a “joint on a chip” device.
The
term “joint-on-a-chip” is an evolution of “lab-on-a-chip,” which is a class of
device that meshes and automates multiple lab techniques into one system that
could fit on a chip no bigger than a few square centimeters in size. By
consolidating the techniques onto one small chip, researchers like Wood can
study the cells in a cost-effective, efficient and productive environment. “More
data for less money and less time.”
Once
the technology for stabilizing the chondrocytes had been developed by Wood and
Saraswat, they sought to identify how it could be utilized by researchers and
industry members. To do that, Wood and Saraswat built a team that included University
of South Dakota business student Thane Hein and Mines Entrepreneur-in-Residence
Russ Enns, landing a $50,000 National Science Foundation I-Corps
grant in July 2020.
The
team also received grant funding from the Governor’s Office of Economic
Development and assistance from DRACO, a South Dakota nonprofit organization
that advises startup companies and entrepreneurs.
NSF
I-Corps grants are not research grants but instead commercialization grants
designed to identify whether there is a market for research developments. Teams
create YouTube videos, interview business leaders and
research market need for their businesses. Initially, the team expected to sell
their “widget” to academic researchers and “big pharma” companies. Instead, after
interviewing more than 121 leaders in business and commercial enterprises, they
learned that big pharmaceutical companies are not working on research to modify
the disease or cure it and that pharmaceutical companies typically contract out
their pre-clinical research.
Small
to mid-size pharmaceutical companies, with 1,000 or less employees, are the
ones focused on osteoarthritis cures. As a result, the CellField team realized
that the best use of their technology is for CellField to work as a contract
research company for those smaller pharmaceutical companies. “What we learned
from I-Corps was that the company should not be a manufacturing company but a
research company,” he says. “It’s the smaller startup companies and mid-sized pharmaceutical
customers who we think will be our target market initially.”
Wood
says researchers are “a long way out on discovering a cure for osteoarthritis,
but we think that if we’re able to develop this company and our technology …
that should really speed things up.”
Currently,
the team is working on prototype development based on feedback from their
I-Corps research. They are also seeking to add additional leadership on the
business side of the startup. But the work continues, with improvements and new
technology still being discovered in the lab.
“We’ve got some exciting new developments that
we’re working on in order to meet the needs of pharmaceutical scientists,” Wood
says. “And we hope that because of our work we can someday see a cure for this
debilitating disease.”