LifeSprout shoots forth from JHU

Johns Hopkins University (JHU) has given a detailed insight into its US-based regenerative medicine spinout LifeSprout, which is aiming to commercialise injections for soft tissue repair.
The spinout emerged with $6.5m of seed funding from spinout-focused investment firm Tedco, biopharmaceutical developer Medytox, AngelMD, Kairos Ventures, Triskelion Investments and Gingko Gofar.
Founded in 2015, LifeSprout is working on a nanofibre-fortified hyaluronic acid gel that could aid the restoration of wounds in muscles and connective tissues resulting from injuries and surgical operations.
LifeSprout’s nanofibres, formed from a polymer already used in surgical sutures, coalesce upon injection at the wound as a scaffold-like structure through which access is granted to wound-healing cells such as macrophages.
The macrophages then signal for healing reinforcements such as blood vessel-forming cells, in theory enabling the patient to gradually rebuild chunks of tissue.
LifeSprout hopes its approach will improve on existing hyaluronic acid-based gels, which often only repair minor wounds, as well as fortified alternatives that are prone to scarring.
The concept has already been trialled on rabbit specimens and could with time be enhanced to mend soft tissues with specific functions such as heart muscle.
LifeSprout is the result of work led by Sashank Reddy, a reconstructive surgeon at JHU’s School of Medicine, with the help of a team including Hai-Quan Mao, a professor of materials science and engineering and associate director of the Johns Hopkins Institute of NanoBioTechnology.
The company received $500,000 in March 2018 from state-run economic development agency Maryland Technology Development Corporation’s seed fund, according to Technical.ly, likely as part of a $2.7m equity round disclosed in a regulatory filing the same month.
– This report has been updated to reflect a press release on the seed round not available at the time of going to press.