BioAesthetics Announces NIH Grant to Develop NextGen Graft for Burn Survivors
Collaborative effort with University of Miami Miller School of Medicine aims to improve wound healing, recovery time, and patient quality of life
RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--BioAesthetics Corporation today announced that it has received a Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I grant through the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) to further develop its platform technology of enhanced biologically derived grafts — capable of sustained drug delivery — to improve outcomes for third degree burn survivors in collaboration with the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. These grants are awarded with the objective of translating promising technologies to the private sector and enable life-saving innovations to reach consumer markets.
Nearly half a million Americans are affected each year by burns requiring medical treatment, with nearly 40,000 patients needing to be hospitalized. Burn wounds have a long-lasting impact on health-related quality of life and affect both physical and mental health. The work under this grant aims to provide proof-of-concept that an acellular biologic graft infused with a drug delivery system — providing a sustained release of an anti-infective to the burn wound site — has the potential to reduce infection rates and act as a scaffold for skin regeneration, thus speeding wound healing and recovery.
“We are enthusiastic to collaborate with BioAesthetics on this grant to study the role of their novel biologically derived graft for burn wound healing. Having grafts with active agents that can accelerate healing and reduce infection are critical components in the development of successful therapies for wound care providers,” said Stephen Davis, Research Professor in the Dr. Phillip Frost Department of Dermatology & Cutaneous Surgery at the Miller School. Davis is the sub-awardee of the grant and will work on this collaboration with BioAesthetics along with his colleagues Carl Schulman, M.D., Ph.D., MSPH, FACS, Executive Dean for Research at the Miller School and expert in acute and reconstructive burn care, and Jie Li, M.D., Ph.D., Associate Professor in the Dr. Phillip Frost Department of Dermatology and Cutaneous Surgery.
“We are incredibly excited about this grant and we are looking forward to the collaboration between the Miller School of Medicine and BioAesthetics,” said Nicholas C. Pashos, Ph.D., Founder and CEO of BioAesthetics. “The University of Miami has a well-established burn model that is essential to developing a graft for third degree burns. Burn reconstruction is one of many indications where we believe our patent-pending platform technology of a drug delivery system within an acellular biologic graft has the potential to improve wound healing, recovery time, and patient quality of life.”
In conjunction with this STTR grant, BioAesthetics is also the recipient of an NIH I-CORPS grant — a mechanism through which companies conduct customer discovery research, complementary to the research grant, that is intended to help inform the company on end-users' biggest challenges and pain-points to better ensure that the research grant is directed in an informative way.
“Through the NIH I-CORPS grant, we will be able to receive user, patient, and physician feedback ensuring that we address the pain-points early on in product development,” added Pashos.
Founded as a spin-out of Tulane University in New Orleans, BioAesthetics is now located in Research Triangle Park, N.C., and was recently honored as Best Medical Device Company through Triangle Business Journal’s Life Science Awards. For more information on BioAesthetics, please visit https://bio-aesthetics.com/.