Opening minds: the biotech company aiming to change stroke victims lives

Dr John Sinden, left, and Olav Helleb of Reneuron. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian

He wants to bore ahole in your head. But dont panic, Olav Helleb is not a modern-day trepanist and it will be a top-notch surgeon, not the 49-year-old Norwegian businessman, holding the drill.

Drilling holes in the skull sounds drastic. But Helleb says it is worth it; the procedure, coupled with injections of stem cells, from his British biotech company Reneuron, could help heal victims of debilitating strokes, he says.

Its a routine thing but it does sound pretty scary to me, Helleb says of cranial drilling. You only do it if you think it is going to make a significant difference to the patient. You set the bar pretty high, its not an antihistamine pill.

The treatment isnt pills but millions of stem cells undifferentiated cells that can be encouraged to grow into all kinds of human cells. Helleb says the cells injected into patients brains can be encouraged to regenerate neurons lost in a stroke.

The field is regenerative medicine, which in a word tells you it is about regenerating cells which are missing or damaged in some way. So in a way it is a cure, he said. Reneuron is re-growing neurons in the brain. The idea is that we can somehow spur the regrowth of those neurons so we can improve the outcomes of strokes.

The treatment, first developed by John Sinden, in a Kings College London laboratory 15 years ago, has passed phase-one trials and the firm has begun phase-two clinical trials with 41 patients.

Helleb, an experienced biotech executive who previously commuted from his Hampstead home to Oslo while head of the Norwegian firm Clavis Pharma, was brought in by Reneurons directors this autumn to drive the firm and its technology from the lab bench into hospitals.

He believes that if the procedure is successful it could give hundreds of thousands of stroke patients their lives back, and save billions for the NHS and other countries healthcare budgets.

At present, he says, stroke patients typically improve for a few weeks, but then stop progressing. Our plan is to treat the patient after a month, maybe two, and kickstart that healing process again, he said. It can have a huge impact. It can make the difference between having a full-time carer helping you with everything to being able to function by yourself.

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Opening minds: the biotech company aiming to change stroke victims lives