Brief Description
MuscleMatrix is developing a hydrogel that could change how medics treat traumatic injuries on the battlefield, as well as revolutionize surgical repairs for civilians with soft tissue injuries. Traumatic and surgical injuries of soft tissue that involve underlying skeletal muscle remain one of the greatest challenges to tissue reconstruction. Severe injuries, such as those involving the loss of a substantial portion of muscle tissue, are not capable of healing on their own and are referred to as volumetric muscle loss (VML) injuries. By definition, VML results in permanent aesthetic and functional deficits of either the injured muscle or the muscle unit.
The company's patented semi-synthetic hyaluronic acid (HyA) hydrogel, called MuscleMatrix™, is a structural scaffold that can be prepared as a hydrogel by in situ crosslinking, or as a lyophilized, terminally sterilized microporous dry scaffold (i.e., sponge) for insertion into the injury. Current treatments for VML neither replace nor restore the muscle, failing to connect the free ends of disrupted fibers to effectively regenerate muscle mass and function.
The company was co-founded by UC Berkeley Professor of Bioengineering, Materials Science, and Engineering Kevin Healy and UCSF Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Orthopedic Surgery George Christ.
Timeline
- 2024. Company founded
Inventors
Kevin Healy, Amit Jha, George Christ, Shane Andrew Browne, Juliana Amaral Passipieri, Morgan Pfaff, Joseph Liu, Kavita Abhay Parekh