IPS HEART is a privately-held biopharmaceutical company, founded in 2014, dedicated to addressing heart attack, heart failure and Duchenne cardiomyopathy via next generation cellular therapy. IPS HEART was the first company to exclusively focus on induced pluripotent stem cells and heart disease. IPS HEART is a resident at Johnson & Johnson Innovation, JLABS in the Texas Medical Center.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), USA, about 1 in 4 deaths in the United states are due to heart disease. Duchenne muscular dystrophy is a rare (1 in 7250 males aged 5-24 years, including Becker dystrophy) inherited condition which effects boys and results in progressive muscle weakness, including that of the heart, resulting in cardiomyopathy.
IPS HEART has recruited, to its Board, Dr. John Lynn Jefferies, Director Advanced Heart Failure and Cardiomyopathy Programs at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. Dr. Jefferies recently supervised the completion of a Phase I study in Duchenne Cardiomyopathy. Other Board members include Dr. Philippe Menasche, Professor of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, University of Paris Descartes. Dr. Menasche recently supervised a Phase I cardiomyocyte stem cell clinical trial in Paris, which recently announced promising results and provides evidence of a proof of concept for work similar to IPS HEART.
IPS HEART recently presented results at the 82nd Annual Scientific Meeting of the Japanese Circulation Society showing over 66% ejection fraction (EF) improvement after 90 days in a mouse model of heart attack treated with human derived IPS HEART cardiomyocytes. These results are an improvement over previous cardiac stem cell trials, which showed at best 3% EF improvement and lacked evidence of heart regeneration. The results further substantiate IPS HEART’s approach.
With $12 million in research funding thus far, IPS HEART is the first company to focus exclusively on the IPS cardiac arena and is currently raising venture capital to expand into global clinical trials.
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