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:

• Prevention and reversal of end-stage renal disease
• Treatment of ischemic and hemorrhagic stroke
• Cardiac conditions
• Restoration of peripheral nerves including spinal cord injury
• Reversal of liver fibrosis
• Orthopedic indications
• Cranio-maxillofacial restoration
• Vascular disease

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.

Stem Cell 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.

Cascia's therapeutics are all based on autologous human mesenchymal stem cells.  Autologous means that the cells are harvested from the same patient that will receive the cell treatment.  We exclusively use adult stem cells from the patient or an identical sibling.  None of our therapeutics use fetal or embryonic tissues, and our preparations contain no animal-derived material.  The primary source of stem cells in the human body is the bone marrow compartment.  Bone marrow is found in the cancellous bone, the sponge-like material in the center of bones, and the most abundant source of bone marrow in the human body is found in the long bones, such as the femur or tibia, or in the large flat bones such as the pelvis.  Typically bone marrow is obtained by inserting a biopsy needle into the ilium, the large bone in the pelvis, and aspirating a quantity of marrow into a syringe which is transferred to a processing laboratory.  True stem cells are an exceeding rare cell type, typically accounting for fewer than 1 out of a million cells in bone marrow, so the processing techniques used to isolate the cells for therapeutic use are critical. 

Unique abilities

Stem cells exhibit two unique abilities that other cells do not have:

1. They have the potential to develop into any type of human tissue, and

2. Stem cells can self-replicate an unlimited number of times

The human body’s ability to repair itself after an episode of disease or injury is a direct result of action of stem cells. The capacity for self-healing is limited however, and when there are too few stem cells in the injured tissue the regeneration process will be incomplete.

Stem cells can repair any type of mesenchymal tissue in the body after completing a multi-stage differentiation process during which a transformation will occur from stem cell to progenitor cell to precursor and finally to mature tissue. While there are some biological differences between stem and progenitor cells the terms are often used interchangeably. In medicine, most “stem cell” therapies are really progenitor cell-based therapeutics, but this is an important distinction. 

Once a cell has partially differentiated into a progenitor cell, it has limited ability to de-differentiate backwards to a true stem cell.  For example, if a patient is administered myoblastic progenitor cells, the cellular phenotype that will differentiate into muscle tissue, those cells might be able to dedifferentiate from skeletal muscle in order to repair smooth muscle tissue, but they cannot dedifferentiate enough to repair bones.  It is vital to administer the least differentiated cell types, and all the required cell types, to achieve healing. 

Cells have a natural tendency to differentiate, and it is extremely difficult to prevent premature differentiation during a cell culture process.  Tissue regeneration products based on culture cells have proven ineffective because while these products contain an abundant number of mature cells, they lack the early stage populations necessary to create blood vessels and connective tissues.  Our proprietary process depletes later stage cells and allows the cells to self-replicate without undergoing differentiation, all without an ex vivo culture process.

Cellular Therapeutics

Cellular therapeutics are a rapidly evolving branch of medicine, but much of the information contained in the popular press is misleading and, in many cases, simply wrong. There are also a number of healthcare providers with questionable ethics that will happily supply treatment regardless of the expected benefit to the patient; thankfully these are in the minority.

Cascia continuously scours the peer-reviewed medical and scientific literature for the latest developments and clinical study results. The information provided on the pages linked to the images below is intended to given an objective overview of the state of the science.  The information is somewhat technical because the intended audience is physicians and other trained medical professionals, but prospective patients may find some of the information useful as well.