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, and B9Creations
technology – 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.”