"Nanotope is a regenerative medicine company that leverages a core set of proprietary technologies to address multiple therapeutic markets. This highly flexible and customizable platform was first developed at Northwestern University by Dr. Samuel I. Stupp, Professor of Materials Science & Engineering, Chemistry and Medicine and Director of the Institute for BioNanotechnology in Medicine (IBNAM). Nanotope is developing a suite of products, each customized to regenerate specific tissues; including neuronal, vascular, bone, myocardial, and cartilage. The products are injectable compounds that work with surviving cells in and around the point of damage to initiate and support tissue regeneration and growth. Once regeneration is complete, the compounds are safely broken down and removed by the body. Nanotope’s lead products target neuron regeneration for prevention or reversal of paralysis associated with spinal cord injury and angiogenesis for advanced wound healing and the treatment of peripheral artery disease."

The Technology:

Nanotope is building a suite of products to be injected into injured tissue, or in the case of wound healing, to be applied topically. Upon injection, the products form a substrate that actively directs surviving cells to re-grow damaged tissue. The technical basis underlying this is a customizable chemical matrix, or gel, of nanofibers that provides three-dimensional bioactive scaffolding in which cells and tissues may grow and differentiate. Two primary features of the gel are its customizable bioactivity and controlled gelation. These features result from engineered small individual molecules that self-assemble into nanofibers under physiological conditions. This proprietary technology was developed by Dr. Samuel Stupp at Northwestern University.

The molecules forming the gel have two distinct regions: a hydrophilic head region that confers bioactivity to the gel and a hydrophobic tail. The molecules are entirely customizable to control everything from the rate of self-assembling to the type of bioactivity conferred by the fully-formed gel of nanofibers. The bioactive head region is a short peptide sequence derived from a protein or peptide that exerts an influence of interest on target tissues. The number of different bioactive regions is limitless and may be engineered to elicit specific cell responses. It is this factor that allows Nanotope to use the same core technology for regeneration of different types of tissues.

This technology provides a flexible and broad platform of “smart” materials to elicit tissue regeneration and healing across diverse cell types when it would otherwise not occur.