Trade.Information

Company Name: Tepha Inc.

Company Type: Research

Company Profile

Regenerative medicine – the use of products to restore, maintain, or improve tissue function – is still a relatively new industry. When Tepha was formed, relatively few major companies had programs in this field. Recently, the situation has begun to change with some medical device and pharmaceutical companies committing substantial resources to this area. Varied approaches are being taken, and they include the use of cell seeding, growth factors, genetic engineering, special biomaterials, and combinations thereof. 

The active field of regenerative medicine is likely to become more competitive over the coming years, and Tepha's products and technology is expected to gain increasing attention. The main competitive factors in the marketplace include safety, efficacy, cost-effectiveness, quality, reliability, pricing, and speed of product development. We firmly believe that Tepha will continue to compete favorably by using its technology to tailor properties of its biomaterials to intended applications. 

Tepha stands to benefit from a number of strategic advantages. These include: 
Its position as an agile, early-stage company with a relatively developed, late-stage technology.
A scientific platform that allows biomaterials to be tailored to a wide range of products.
A technology to produce absorbable, elastomeric biomaterials that creates novel products and opens up new market opportunities.
Robust intellectual property, including control of a very broad patent portfolio.
Proven demonstrations of the Company’s technology in regenerative medicine.
Ability to leverage its technology in multiple products for multiple markets.
Demonstrated opportunities for partnerships, joint ventures, and other alliances for specific products.
A highly talented management team with a diverse range of relevant experiences.
A board of directors comprised of professionals seasoned in the medical device industry.
An advisory group that includes top-thought leaders in multiple medical and scientific fields.
The current movement of many medical device companies away from animal-derived biomaterials and toward synthetic solutions.
The situation where the market for devices employing absorbable biomaterials is set for substantial growth in the near future.

About Company

Tepha was incorporated in 1998 following a successful collaboration between our sister company, Metabolix, Inc. (Cambridge, MA) and Children’s Hospital, Boston in project involving cardiovascular tissue engineering. Surgeons at Children’s Hospital had been attempting to develop a tissue engineered heart valve that could grow with the patient. Such a product would represent a quantum leap in heart valve surgery for the pediatric population, eliminating the need to replace the valve after a few years. Using the Company’s proprietary technology, Tepha was able to successfully produce a biomaterial scaffold suitable for tissue engineered valves. The results of subsequent experiments were astounding. It was found that the newly implanted valves grew with their recipients, and its scaffolds completely remodeled into new heart valve tissue that resembled the native tissues within six to eight weeks.
The success of the Company’s technology in cardiovascular tissue engineering has caught the attention of many medical device developers, and it has opened the door for Tepha to form product development partnerships for the application of its technology to a variety of absorbable medical devices. Since our polymers are synthesized by a proprietary transgenic production technology that accesses an extensive library of building blocks, we are able to tailor the properties of our polymers to specific medical applications. The vast design space offered by our technology presents opportunities to engineer new medical materials with varying rates of bioabsorption that cannot be produced by any other means. Furthermore, unlike competing biomaterials, Tepha’s polymers are biocompatible and non-inflammatory, degrading by cell friendly processes into metabolites that already exist in humans.
Our patented technology has resulted in the first biologically-derived absorbable elastomers for medical use, opening up a range of novel device possibilities. Our polymers are aggressively being evaluated for use in an extensive range of medical devices in addition to bioengineered heart valves, including orthopedic fixation devices and general surgical products such as sutures, patches, and mesh.