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Personalized, bio-engineered skin grafts for the permanent treatment of skin defects

Project description

Skin regeneration offers hope to millions

Millions of patients worldwide face the distressing consequences of skin defects every year, such as burns and excisions, necessitating surgical intervention for restoration. However, the standard treatment, skin autografting, often leaves behind permanent scars that disfigure, cause pain and impede movement. This not only significantly impacts patients’ quality of life but also poses a substantial burden on the healthcare system. In an extraordinary breakthrough, the EU-funded denovoSkin project offers a revolutionary solution. Its patented, personalised, autologous bioengineered human skin graft, classified as an advanced therapy medicinal product, tackles the issue of donor site shortage while minimising scarring after transplantation. Overall, the project aims to bring hope and healing to patients worldwide on a larger scale.

Objective

Every year in the world, more than 50M patients suffer from skin defects (e.g. burns, excision, etc.) and need surgical intervention to restore skin function. Standard of care, skin autografting, very often leaves these patients with scars. Scars are permanent and disfiguring, and can also be painful and highly debilitating. Indeed, they may also impair movement and growth, and require several follow-up surgeries, intense homecare and psychosocial rehabilitation. Hence, scars significantly affect patient’s quality of life, along with the economic burden for the health-care system. Furthermore, in the case of large wounds, donor site shortage represents a real clinical issue.

denovoSkin™ is a patented, personalized, autologous bio-engineered human skin graft classified as Advanced Therapy Medical Product (ATMP). It is engineered in large quantities starting-off from a stamp-sized skin biopsy of the patient, thus solving the donor site shortage issue. Moreover, because of its dermo-epidermal structure, denovoSkin™ leads to minimal scarrring after transplantation. Its outstanding performance could considerably reduce or even avoids further corrective interventions, allowing for considerable savings in terms of costs. denovoSkin™ is also granted with Orphan Drug Designation for the treatment of burns by Swissmedic, EMA and FDA.

So far, more than €17.5M have been invested over the last 16 years of research into the development and the clinical testing of denovoSkin™. To have denovoSkin™ fully projected at a European and global level we need a further investment of €3.57M to automate its production, de-risking the entire denovoSkin™ project by assuring a real delivery to patients worldwide while providing optimal logistics and quality of product.

The proposed work in Phase 2 of the SME instrument fits into our overall plan to reach the market by contributing the financial resources needed to plan a fast sound wider deployment of denovoSkin™ and its market uptake.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.

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Programme(s)

Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.

Topic(s)

Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.

Funding Scheme

Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.

SME-2 - SME instrument phase 2

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Call for proposal

Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.

(opens in new window) H2020-EIC-SMEInst-2018-2020

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Coordinator

CUTISS AG
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 2 499 866,25
Address
WEINBERGSTRASSE 35 WYSS TRANSLATIONAL CENTER ZURICH DENOVOS
8006 Zurich
Switzerland

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SME

The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.

Yes
Region
Schweiz/Suisse/Svizzera Zürich Zürich
Activity type
Private for-profit entities (excluding Higher or Secondary Education Establishments)
Links
Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 3 571 237,50
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