When you look in a mirror, do you see saggy cheek wrinkles running down at an angle from each side of your nose? If so, you’re on your way to understanding the significance of a biotech company called Fibrocell Science, Inc. (FCSC). Those wrinkles are called nasolabial fold wrinkles, and are considered the single most revealing indicator of your real age. Try it yourself. Use your hands to stretch your face back so that those sag wrinkles go away, and notice how much younger your face looks.
Developing an effective and affordable non-invasive anti-wrinkle treatment is cosmetic’s Holy Grail, and Fibrocell Science may have discovered the answer. The company has made major breakthroughs in developing a way to remove, regenerate, and reintroduce a person’s own fibroblasts, cells that contribute to the formation of connective tissue fibers that are critical to skin elasticity and tissue repair.
The patented process is called Fibrocell Therapy, and involves the generation and injection of azficel-T, a personalized treatment based upon the person’s own cells.
• The process begins by removing a small sample of cells from behind a patient’s ear, and sending it to the company’s advanced production facility in Pennsylvania, controlled by FDA defined Current Good Manufacturing Practices – cGMP.
• There the cells go through a process that expands fibroblasts into hundreds of millions of new cells, which are then formulated into an autologous cellular therapy.
• Cells are frozen and used for multiple treatment sessions.
• The formulated therapy is then reintroduced into the patient’s own skin by injection, with the goal of increasing the local population of fibroblasts and collagen formation.
In controlled clinical studies, a significant improvement in the appearance of nasolabial fold wrinkles was observed after injecting azficel-T. Fibrocell even has a proposed brand name for the eventual product – laViv®. Given that the global anti-aging market could approach $275 billion by 2013, it’s a name worth remembering.
But Fibrocell’s future is based upon more than the golden nugget of wrinkle removal. Fibroblasts are important for things like wound healing. The company is focused on the development of personalized autologous (derived or transferred from the same individual’s body) cell therapies for aesthetic, medical, and scientific applications. Fibrocell’s future scientific focus will be on regenerative medicine that leverages the direct and indirect therapeutic benefit of fibroblasts, and they are working with UCLA in a research collaboration involving autologous stem cell research.
For additional information, visit the company’s website at www.FibroCellScience.com
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