Cascia

Cascia Technologies

Cascia employs a range of technologies including cellular therapeutics, cell delivery devices, small molecule drugs, and recombinant proteins to address serious unmet medical needs.  Our principal focus is on difficult to treat metabolic diseases, especially those associated with fibrosis.

Our principal therapeutic areas of focus are:

 

 

 

Guiding Principles

We operate with three core principles in mind:

 Therapeutic Efficacy

Every healthcare product must provide a benefit to the patient.  It may not always be possible to develop products that work for every patient afflicted by a disease, but every product we bring to market will be effective for a readily identifiable patient population.  That may require us to develop diagnostic tools that help us determine if a particular individual is likely to respond well to a treatment.

Technological Feasibility

The healthcare industry is full of examples where researchers and scientists developed novel treatments without giving any thought to the ability to translate their laboratory work to the commercial market.  We focus our efforts on innovations that can be executed with present technologies and without the need to undertake manufacturing design projects requiring tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.

Economic Sustainability

The healthcare system is dealing with a rapidly aging population, which necessarily increases spending on healthcare, and with a constant stream of ever more expensive treatments.  At Cascia we recognize our responsibility to bring new therapies to patients in need and earning a financial return for our shareholders without increasing burdens on the system.

In particular, we seek to commercialize advanced therapies that can be provided in a typical community hospital just as easily as they are delivered in major university medical research centers.

Cellular Therapies

Our approach to cellular therapy is unique.  Most companies developing cellular therapies take the same approach; culturing cells in a manufacturing environment and/or inducing the cells to differentiate partially or fully into mature tissues.  This has two principal limitations.

  1. Ex vivo culture of cells is a very expensive proposition and, in most cases, is totally unnecessary to achieve a therapeutic effect.  Cell culture facilities are exceedingly expensive with small facilities costing around $50 million and larger ones up to $500 million or more.  The sheer capital intensity guarantees that the eventual product will be extremely expensive, and if the project is a failure, the investors will have incurred a huge loss unnecessarily.  Cell culture has another disadvantage in that it is not quick; it adds weeks to months to each course of treatment.

  2. Terminal differentiation of cells is not how the human body repairs damaged tissue, and that explains why cellular products produced in a factory have such limited efficacy.  Our research is informed by the principles of biology, and we make every attempt to create therapeutics that replicate nature, which means that we deliver very early stage stem and progenitor cells into a prepared tissue environment and we let the body do the rest.
Our cellular preparations are produced in the hospital in a small processing laboratory established with a very modest capital investment.  We put our energies into making maximum use of information technology to connect standard laboratory equipment to perform as a single unit, while ensuring that we work with biology rather than trying to make cells do something nature never intended.  We manage to deliver a highly effective cell dose that contains a therapeutic number of cells by creating biodegradable carriers that allow the cells to expand in the patient's body rather than a factory. 

Most importantly, our approach is fast.  We can prepare a unit of cells in a few hours at which point they are ready for transplant into the patient.  In many situations, such as strokes and heart attacks, cells can exert their beneficial effects only when administered at the time of the event.  If the cells come from a central production facility weeks later, the healing process has already begun.

Pharmaceutical Pipeline

We address the challenge of fibrosis by focusing on collagen metabolism.  All scar tissue is created by aberrant collagen deposition during the healing process, and it is the replacement of functional tissue with scar that leads to reduced kidney function, liver cirrhosis, and cardiomyopathy.  Rather than treating the underlying disease, we prevent and reverse fibrosis by addressing collagen production itself.

The production of collagen scar is an extremely complex process, and this allows us to modulate the production of scar tissue at various points in the process.  Some of our drug candidates are likely to work better in resolving existing scar while others prevent collagen from ever forming, and some will work better in parenchymal organs, like the kidney and liver, while others will provide benefits in skin and connective tissues.  Regardless of what is necessary, Cascia has an approach to address substantially all fibrotic diseases.