Gene Therapy to Replace Invasive Procedures
The No. 1 killer in America is heart disease. Specifically, coronary artery disease, caused by atherosclerosis (hardening and narrowing of the arteries), affects 1.8 million Americans each year, according to American Heart Association in Dallas, Texas. Hand-in-glove with that statistic is the number of Americans with high cholesterol (hyperlipidemia), which hovers over 98 million. It is the leading cause of death in industrial nations and claims the lives of nearly 500,000 in the United States each year.
“Our goal is to reduce the need for traditional drug therapy, bypass surgery and balloon angioplasty,” said Christopher Reinhard, president and co-founder of Collateral Therapeutics, Inc., based in San Diego, Calif. “The objective of the product which is listed as a ‘biologic’ not a medicine, is to enhance the body’s natural healing process, by stimulating the heart to grow additional blood vessels to help overcome the effects of coronary artery disease.”
The gene therapy is indicated for people who suffer from reduced blood flow to the heart as a result of atherosclerosis causing angina (pain in the chest). Instead of surgery to bypass the arteries to the heart or angioplasty to unblock the arteries, they inject a deactivated cold virus that has had the gene for a growth factor spliced into it. The growth factor stimulates the production of new blood arteries in the heart, where the blockage has impaired it.
“Like cancer products, gene therapy will not provide just one answer,” he said. “There are a number of different vectors and approaches for various diseases, especially in the field of cardiovascular therapy. We’re a third generation biotech company and we develop different methods of gene therapies, like recipes, and our patents cover our methods.”