Invests in biotech company Interface Biotech

Coloplast has invested in the Danish biotech company Interface Biotech A/S in return for a 15 per cent stake in the company.

 

The investment has been made via Coloplast's recently established incubator function, which is charged with identifying and exploiting technologies outside Coloplast's three core business areas while at the same time enhancing Coloplast's expertise and insight into new technologies outside the normal scope of Coloplast's Research & Development organisation.

The collaboration is to support the two companies' work within biomaterials, including in connection with cartilage cells. The long-term aim is for the collaboration to help the treatment of patients with traumatised knees.

In future, knee trauma can be treated by removing a piece of healthy cartilage from the patient, isolating cartilage cells from this and culturing them at a laboratory to achieve a significant increase in the number of such cells, and, lastly, fixating biomaterial with the harvested cells at the site of the cartilage damage, thus accelerating the healing of the knee compared with conventional methods, where the patient has to wait for the cartilage to heal by itself.

Coloplast's contribution to such treatment will typically consist in supplying the scaffolds on which the cultured cartilage cells are to be fixated before being implanted in the patient. In return, Interface Biotech will be responsible for harvesting and culturing the cartilage cells.

Since its establishment in 1999, Interface Biotech has already gained extensive experience in artificial membranes for repair of tissue damage such as cartilage damage.

The collaboration between Interface Biotech and Coloplast aims at expanding the use of the combined technologies into other clinical areas.

 

Facts about Interface Biotech

Interface Biotech is a privately owned company that was established in 1999 and focuses on the development of new treatment regimes for both cartilage and bone disorders. The company also offers a range of other research services within cell, tissue, cartilage and bone research. In addition, Interface Biotech has developed a second-generation product (Cartilink-2^®), which is used for the treatment of cartilage defects in the knee joint (Autologous Chondrocyte Implantation) using patient-derived cartilage cells.

In March 2006, Interface Biotech completed the construction of a number of state-of-the-art cell culture laboratories of international top class. The new laboratories fulfil the latest requirements set by the Danish Medical Agency (DMA) and the European Agency for the Evaluation of Medicinal Products (EMEA). Furthermore, in April 2007, Interface Biotech was authorised by the DMA as a National Tissue Center. Interface Biotech has also been approved for culturing human cells for implantations.