By acquiring two wound-healing cell therapy assets from global medical company Smith+Nephew, Healiva establishes one of the world’s broadest affordable, personalized, end-to-end wound care solutions. The move will boost the startup’s rapid growth and accelerate the market launch of one of the products.
Founded in 2020 in Lugano by Bioseutica BV and Priyanka Dutta-Passecker, Healiva® is a patient-centric biotech company delivering life-enhancing precision medicine for patients with chronic and acute wounds. The startup creates tailored wound solutions through a multi-pronged approach that combines enzyme technology, medical devices, and cell therapies. Its pipeline products address the entire spectrum of the wound-care process for chronic wounds, from key first steps to the completion of wound closure.
Expanding its portfolio of end-to-end care for chronic wounds, the startup has acquired two wound-healing cell therapy assets from Smith+Nephew, the global medical technology business with over USD 5.2 billion in revenue and more than 17,500 workers. The first asset, EpiDex®, is an autologous epidermal equivalent that provides a surgery-free approach to healing chronic venous leg ulcers (VLUs). Having previously been approved for the Swiss market, Healiva’s® acquisition of the complete product dossier should enable the rapid market re-launch of EpiDex®.
The second asset, now named healiva®002, is an off-the-shelf, allogeneic cell therapy that has previously demonstrated clinical efficacy in healing VLUs that are resistant to standard treatments.
Beneficiaries from the new therapy are mainly the elderly, with 2–3% of whom have venous/arterial leg ulcers, and people with diabetes, 25% of whom will suffer from potentially disabling diabetic foot ulcers (DFUs) during their lifetime. With both of these populations continuing to grow, the burden of chronic wounds and, therefore, the need for new treatments will only become more acute. Today, the standard treatment for VLUs and DFUs requires multiple procedures which come with lengthy recovery times.
“We created Healiva® to improve the lives of the millions suffering from chronic wounds by delivering innovative, effective new treatments to patients,” said Healiva’s® Founder and CEO, Priyanka Dutta-Passecker, PhD, MBA. “These remarkable cell therapies will contribute to that mission by addressing crucial needs in early- and late-stage chronic wound care. By adding these pioneering technologies to our growing portfolio of wound treatments, we will be able to continue our rapid growth by progressing to commercialization within four years of founding.”
“With 36 million people worldwide currently suffering from chronic wounds, we urgently need novel solutions for hard-to-treat wounds,” said Valerio Maria Ferrari, Bioseutica Group Chairman and Co-Founder of Healiva®. “Following this acquisition, we are looking forward to bringing two such solutions to market, beginning with EpiDex® in Switzerland, pending approval by Swissmedic, followed by Germany and other EMEA countries. Meanwhile, for healiva®002, we will improve the product, scale up the manufacturing process, and continue its clinical development for future commercial success at scale.”
(Press release/RAN)
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