Celaid Therapeutics Inc. announced today that it has been awarded up to approx. 2.7 billion yen ($19M USD) in non-dilutive grant funding as “Strengthening Program for Pharmaceutical Startup Ecosystem” program by the Japanese Agency for Medical Research and Development (AMED). The grant will be used to support the development of Celaid’s lead program “CLD-001”, an ex vivo expanded Hematopoietic Stem Cell (HSC) Therapy for pediatric non-malignant diseases.
“The Japanese government has announced that it will provide funding support for pharmaceutical startups over the next five years through 300 billion yen ($2.1 Billion USD) grant as Strengthening Program for Pharmaceutical Startup Ecosystem program. Being selected for this program is a vote of confidence in our product and our company.” said Nobuyuki Arakawa, Celaid’s President and CEO.
Through this grant program, Celaid will reinforce non-clinical and clinical development of CLD-001 in the US. and accelerate development to deliver CLD-001 to patients suffering from pediatric non-malignant diseases worldwide as soon as possible.
About CLD-001, an ex vivo expanded Hematopoietic Stem Cell (HSC) Therapy
CLD-001 is being developed as a hematopoietic stem cell therapy product for severe pediatric non-malignant disease. Rare blood diseases such as aplastic anemia, primary immunodeficiency, inherited metabolic disorder, and sickle cell disease, which start in childhood and are associated with various physical and neurological complications, have a very poor prognosis. Currently, the only curative therapy is allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT). On the other hand, there are still significant unmet needs for allogeneic HSCT due to donor problems such as bone marrow donor shortage and HLA type mismatch, as well as side effects such as transplant-related mortality and graft-versus-host disease (GvHD).
CLD-001 is a hematopoietic stem cell product that solves the donor problem, side effects, and disadvantages described above.
In addition to solving the donor problem by using frozen cord blood stored in a cord blood bank as the cell source, CLD-001 also solves the bottleneck of low HSC counts in cord blood with our proprietary HSC expansion technology, enabling us to provide HSCs with the best HLA type for the patient. CLD-001, the HLA best-match and bone marrow-constructible HSCs, is expected to significantly improve overall survival after HSC therapy.
Celaid Therapeutics Overview
Celaid Therapeutics Inc. is a startup born out of the University of Tokyo and University of Tsukuba with proprietary technology for selective ex vivo HSC expansion. By safely and efficiently expanding human HSCs, Celaid aims to provide the next generation of cell and gene therapy products for cell therapy targeting hematologic disease, ex vivo HSC gene therapy for genetic disorders, and angiogenesis for ischemic diseases.
