Business Weekly - Cambridge, UK

NovaThera is a university spin out from Imperial College London. It was initially set up in 2003 with Challenge Fund seed money of £250K. We raised £2.75 million in July 2005 (from Imperial College and private investors,) enabling us to establish headquarters at the Babraham Campus.

We now have office, manufacturing and R&D facilities. The business is developing rapidly with several products in the clinic. To drive the expansion we are looking to raise a further £2-5 million in the next three months. The investment climate is good if you have a good story and real commercial prospects. We have had a lot of interest from the US, for example.

Our proprietary biomaterial TheraGlass is ready for the clinic in applications for burns and anti-scarring (with our partner ABT Inc US). We have the second generation of materials (combined with large human proteins) ready for development with our partner Pharming (Netherlands). Our strategy is to drive the applications to market as quickly as we can. In parallel we are developing our cell expansion technology for commercialisation and looking at cell treatments for lung disease.

We have plenty of things to do and are now on a recruitment drive for commercial managers and project managers. Our first product will be a cream containing TheraGlass, designed to be a simple, effective and antibiotic treatment for burns. A formulation to prevent scarring should follow. These programmes should deliver products for launch before the end of 2007.

I think this is absolutely correct in some cases. There is great promise in regenerative medicine but some way to go, hence our strategy of early revenue generation from biomaterials. But I believe things are beginning to move into the clinic (over 30 clinical trials on stem cells and heart repair) and so we will see an acceleration in real news and developments over the next few years.

Regenerative medicine approaches have a spectacularly successful past history, for example, the miracle of heart, kidney, lung, liver and bone marrow transplants. Given the proven medical success and the relative safety of the approach I feel that there will be significant advances quite quickly as companies bring products to market.

The first stem cell therapy - bone marrow transplantation - is used across the world already! Additional applications (particularly heart repair and nerve and brain repair) are undergoing trials now. Expect approvals within five years. The barriers that need to be overcome are selecting the clinical end points to measure success and the problem of large scale manufacture of good quality cells.

China is a vast, exciting prospect. It has over one billion people (three times the size of Europe) with enormous manufacturing, technical and scientific resources. Biotechnology is underdeveloped and regenerative medicine is a key technology component of the Chinese government's plans for the future.

We are positioning SteMing Asia, our JV with Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, to be a leading provider of cells for regenerative medicine therapies. SteMing has already raised funds in China and is set for expansion.

Given their progress so far, the experienced management team and their connections, we believe SteMing should be a very valuable business within five years. I am also excited by the interest shown from the US and Europe from companies who would like to partner with SteMing to introduce their technologies into China in a relatively painless way.