Rejuvenate Bio to Launch a Gene Therapy Trial for Heart Failure in Dogs

One of the many possible paths towards developing a new medical technology is to first focus on veterinary use. It is considerably less costly in time and resources to develop a therapy for dogs, say, than it is to develop a therapy for humans. Later, given robust success in veterinary medicine, the therapy can be brought into the sphere of human medicine. This is the approach taken by Rejuvenate Bio for their class of regenerative gene therapies. As noted here, the company is moving forward to trials in companion animals, starting later this year. Back in 2015, the Church lab at Harvard began testing a variety of therapies focused on age reversal using CRISPR, a gene editing system that was much easier and faster to use than older techniques. Since then, Professor Church and his lab have conducted a myriad of experiments and gathered lots of data with which to plan future strategies for tackling aging. Last year, we learned that Rejuvenate Bio had already conducted some initial studies with beagles and were planning to reverse aging using CRISPR gene therapy. The goal was to move these studies forward to a larger scale as a step towards bringing similar therapies to humans to prevent age-related diseases. Choosing to develop therapies for dogs helps pave the way for therapies that address the aging processes in humans and could support their approval, which would otherwise be much more challenging. If Rejuvenate Bio can produce robust data in dogs showing tha...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs