Research & Development

ExpressGraft™_Enhance: Enhancing Antimicrobial Activity

Antibiotic resistance is a growing health care concern that has a particularly profound affect on the treatment of burns and other severe skin injuries. Skin grafts are routinely used to treat such injuries, however infection is the number one cause of skin graft rejection. Also, chronic diabetic skin ulcers are especially susceptible to infection. These infections further impair wound healing and increase the risk of amputation, a life-threatening complication of diabetes. The standard of care for chronic, infected, non-healing diabetic wounds is antibiotic treatment and synthetic dressings. Because of the increasing threat of antibiotic resistance, especially in the chronic wound, the clinician is limited to more potent antibiotics with undesirable effects on cell viability and migration. There is an urgent need for innovative approaches to supplement antibiotic treatment regimes used in open wound therapy.

Stratatech’s ExpressGraft™_Enhance pipeline product has been genetically engineered to overproduce naturally-occurring antimicrobial proteins called host defense peptides. Data recently published in the journal Molecular Therapy showed there are 139-fold more anti-infective proteins in ExpressGraft™_Enhance tissue in vitro than in unmodified tissue. ExpressGraft™_Enhance tissue reduced the growth of A. baumannii, a pathogenic, multi-drug-resistant bacterium, by 100-fold in vivo compared to unmodified tissue.

ExpressGraft™ _Vascular: Enhancing Vascularization Properties

Cutaneous ulcers afflict approximately 4.5 million patients in the United States each year. It is estimated that 15% of older adults in the United States suffer from chronic, hard-to-heal skin wounds. Many of these wounds result in severe complications including amputations and life-threatening infections. Healing is often impaired by hypoxia, or oxygen deprivation, so strategies to enhance the formation of blood vessels and simultaneously stimulate multiple repair processes have the potential to significantly improve the treatment and healing of chronic wounds. To coordinately express elevated levels of multiple therapeutic factors that will promote the formation of normal vessels, Stratatech scientists have introduced a master regulator of wound-healing responses into the NIKS® keratinocytes using non-viral vectors This regulator not only causes the expression of blood-vessel-forming factors, it stimulates the production of a host of other important would-healing factors as well.

ExpressGraft™_Shield: Cell-Based, Chronic Wound Therapy for Older Adults

An increase in proteolytic activity, or activity that breaks down important proteins, is associated with aging of the skin, predisposing the elderly to tissue damage. Furthermore, chronic wounds inherently exhibit a highly proteolytic environment, resulting in abnormal degradation of important structures within the skin and the proteins that promote their growth. Therefore, the proteolytic nature of aged skin not only contributes to impaired acute wound healing, but perpetuates existing chronic skin-related wounds in older adults. Strategies to mitigate the highly proteolytic environment of chronic wounds have the potential to dramatically enhance the healing of these hard-to-heal wounds. To date, no biological treatment options targeting the proteolytic nature of chronic wounds have been developed and marketed. Stratatech scientists have genetically enhanced human skin cells to express a functional, bioactive proteinase inhibitor. These cells are the foundation of Stratatech’s ExpressGraft™_Shield, a cell-based gene therapy product that combats the excess proteolytic activity associated with chronic cutaneous wounds in the elderly.