Regenerative medicine for cost- and time-efficient pet treatment

Project Information

Vetherapy

Grant agreement ID: 863417

DOI

10.3030/863417

Project closed

EC signature date 26 April 2019

Start date 1 May 2019

End date 30 September 2019

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Innovation In SMEs

Total cost

€ 71 429,00

EU contribution

€ 50 000,00

Coordinated by

VETHERAPY - INVESTIGACAO E DESENVOLVIMENTO EM BIOTECNOLOGIA
Portugal

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - Vetherapy (Regenerative medicine for cost- and time-efficient pet treatment)

Reporting period: 2019-05-01 to 2019-09-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Stem cell-based therapies are usually only developed in academic research centres. Therefore, they tend to be very difficult to access for veterinary use and much more expensive than traditional procedures. Furthermore, stem cell therapies pose one major problem: transportation to the point of-care without losing viability and therapeutic efficiency. The current methods keep cell in saline solution where cell viability can be ensure only for 4-6 hours, thus restricting the delivery of stem cell therapies both in time and space.

The overall objective of the vetherapy project is to finalise the development and launch commercially PET-STEM. PET-STEM is the novel stem cell therapy for veterinary application developed by vetherapy. The stem cell field in veterinary medicine continues to evolve rapidly both experimentally and clinically. Several veterinary diseases may be treated with the administration of stem cells. Thus, it is important to implement and expand stem cell applications, such as Vetherapy’s solutions, in the clinical treatment of veterinary patients to get more insights on the benefits of stem cell therapies for future application on humans

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The key milestone achieved during the project was the selection of the product to finalize for commercialization. Vetherapy deeply analysed the commercial and business potential of both products. PET-STEM’s target market is larger than WOUND-FIX’s and is expected to grow faster in the next years, owing to increase number of pets affected by osteoarthritis as well as other chronic inflammatory disorders, which could represent future applications for PET-STEM (higher scalability). Particularly, the current lack of cost-effective solutions to this problem represent a lucrative opportunity for Vetherapy. Considering a similar investment and market penetration, financial projections estimated up to 2025 highlighted the commercial potential of PET-STEM, which creates revenues 7-times higher than WOUND-FIX. Considering this margin, Vetherapy decided to focus first on PET-STEM, and has defined the industrialization activities required for its commercialization and all necessary suppliers and stakeholders involved.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The project has a wide impact on two main stakeholders: veterinarians and pet-owners. For veterinarians, they offer either better treatments for diseases that had no cure or replace routine procedures that have limited efficiency. These treatments allow a faster healing for better and safer results. For pet-owners, our products enable a significant improvement in clinical outcome of the therapy, reducing time and workload required for the animal healthcare, with a consequent economic benefit.

Vetherapy treatment