Frederick, MD (PRWEB) November 28, 2013

Dr. Jon Rowley and Dr. Uplaksh Kumar, Co-Founders of RoosterBio, Inc., a newly formed biotech startup located in Frederick, are paving the way for even more innovation in the rapidly growing fields of Synthetic Biology and Regenerative Medicine. Synthetic Biology combines engineering principles with basic science to build biological products, including regenerative medicines and cellular therapies. Regenerative medicine is a broad definition for innovative medical therapies that will enable the body to repair, replace, restore and regenerate damaged or diseased cells, tissues and organs. Regenerative therapies that are in clinical trials today may enable repair of damaged heart muscle following heart attack, replacement of skin for burn victims, restoration of movement after spinal cord injury, regeneration of pancreatic tissue for insulin production in diabetics and provide new treatments for Parkinsons and Alzheimers diseases, to name just a few applications.

While the potential of the field is promising, the pace of development has been slow. One main reason for this is that the living cells required for these therapies are cost-prohibitive and not supplied at volumes that support many research and product development efforts. RoosterBio will manufacture large quantities of standardized primary cells at high quality and low cost, which will quicken the pace of scientific discovery and translation to the clinic. Our goal is to accelerate the development of products that incorporate living cells by providing abundant, affordable and high quality materials to researchers that are developing and commercializing these regenerative technologies says Dr. Rowley.

RoosterBios current focus is to supply high volume research-grade cells manufactured with processes consistent with current Good Manufacturing Practices (cGMP). These cells will be used for tissue engineering research and cell-based product development. This will position RoosterBio to quickly move on to producing clinical-grade cells to be used in translational R&D and clinical studies.

We have spent almost 20 years as cell and tissue technologists and have lived with the pain of needing to generate large amounts of cells for experiments this whole time. RoosterBio was founded to address this problem for cell and tissue engineers, saving them time and money, and accelerating their path to the clinic, says Dr. Rowley. RoosterBio will supply cells, starting with adult human bone marrow-derived stem cells, at volumes that will allow for a more rapid pace of experimentation in the lab.

We will also offer paired media that has been engineered to quickly and efficiently expand the supplied cells to hundreds of millions or billions of cells within 1-2 weeks, something that would take 4-8 weeks using cell and media systems currently on the market, adds Dr. Kumar. We aim to usher in a new era of productivity to the field, and we believe that our products will at least triple the efficiency of the average laboratory.

RoosterBio, Inc. is located in the Frederick Innovative Technology Center on Metropolitan Court in Frederick. Dr. Rowley entered into the incubation program in October of this year, and already gained four full time employees, and has several academic and industrial collaborators lined up. This team has made remarkable progress and are already poised for their official product launch for their human bone marrow-derived Mesenchymal Stem Cells (hBM-MSC), anticipated in March 2014.

RoosterBios product formats have been extraordinarily well received by the market, and RoosterBio has already secured customers who are anxiously awaiting their product launch. "I am excited to see that someone is taking on the challenge of providing a sufficient number of MSCs to immediately start experiments upon their receipt. This saves us several weeks of time upfront waiting for cells to expand to volumes that allow us to begin experiments, says Todd McDevitt, Director of the Stem Cell Engineering Center at the Georgia Institute of Technology. For tissue engineering folks like myself, this means we can focus our time on high priority research questions and not spend the majority of our time performing routine cell culture."

The Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine industry is one of the fastest growing in the life science sector with the total expenditure in 2011 at $17.1 billion. This number is expected to increase in 2020 to $40.5 billion. The sales of stem cell products accounted for $1.38 billion in 2010 and is expected to reach $3.9 billion by the year 2014 and $8 billion in annual revenues by 2020.

About RoosterBio

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Startup to Strengthen Synthetic Biology and Regenerative ...