ACES profile: Innovation in their bones

Professor Molly Stevens

The biomedical materials company, set up three years ago under the name BioCeramic Therapeutics to commercialise the research of Molly Stevens’s group in the Materials Department at Imperial College London, is developing bioactive materials for orthopaedic and dental applications. Currently located in the Imperial College’s incubator, RepRegen already has a portfolio of eight patent applications.

Stevens joined Imperial in 2004. She is Research Director for Biomedical Material Sciences in the Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Research Director for Biomedical Materials at Imperial. Her research includes exploiting self-assembly mechanisms and the way the body recognises molecules to create dynamic nanomaterials, biosensors and drug delivery systems.

“The idea is to create new materials that help the body to regenerate in much more efficient ways,” says Stevens. “The idea is that we can promote the activity of the cells that repair the body while inhibiting the cells that destroy bone in the body.”

“Many patients who have had bone removed because of tumours or accidents live in real pain. By repairing bone defect sites in the body with bone-like material that best mimics the properties of their real bone we could improve their lives immeasurably,” says Stevens.

As Professor of Biomedical Materials and Regenerative Medicine, Stevens, RepRegen’s Chief Scientific Officer, combines areas of science that rarely come together in one group. Indeed, Stevens jokes that she has recruited researchers from just about every area of science and engineering to work in her group. The research team also includes people with experience in surgery. “They can make sure that we make something that surgeons can use,” says Stevens.

Stevens’s decision to become actively involved in commercialising her research owes a lot to time she spent at MIT, she says. Researchers there were constantly setting up new businesses. While doing postdoctoral research at Robert Langer’s group at MIT, Stevens also realised the importance of patenting to protect the results of her research.

It was partly Imperial’s reputation for spinning out research that prompted Stevens to move her group to the university.

Stevens started the company because she realised that her group’s research wasn’t just delivering interesting one-off ideas, but had “a range of different, interesting technologies that would be complementary. We have a series of different inventions,” she says.

Stevens also wanted to ensure that the research delivered real benefits to patients. “If we are working on materials that have the potential to help in patient treatment, it is our duty to make sure that they are really useful rather than end up in academic journals.” But the journals are still important, insists Stevens, whose work has made it into the pages of some of the more prestigious research journals.

She has successfully balanced both sides of her life. In 2004, MIT’s Technology Review magazine included Stevens in its list of 100 top innovators under 35. She was just 30 at the time. On the academic side, in 2007 she was the first woman to win the Royal Pharmaceutical Society’s Conference Science Medal, which goes to someone with a proven track record of independent research and whose published work shows outstanding promise.

That promise has helped RepRegen to raise money during difficult times for technology start-ups. The company’s first funding round, in February 2007, raised just over £1 million. A second round, in October 2009, raised a further £1.2 million, enough to support the transition from research to commercialisation for a year.

Ian Brown, who joined RepRegen as its CEO in January 2010, as a part of the company’s strategy to make that transition, says that by the end of the year revenues should begin to flow into the company from licensing and product sales.

The UK Technology Strategy Board has also provided financial backing for RepRegen to develop different aspects of the technology. In all, the company has more than £500,000 in research grants in addition to the money raised from investors.

The company also has its sights on second-generation smart materials, fibrous bioactive scaffolds that mimic the native tissue in the body. The aim is to develop materials that can repair defects in tissues such as cartilage, skin and heart after myocardial infarct.

“Our plans extend to the repair of any tissue,” says Stevens.

One idea that the company hopes to develop is to “dope” a scaffold of bioactive material with cells taken from a patient. Such an approach that could accelerate the body’s own repair processes, eventually the scaffold gets absorbed and you end up with new tissue.

Part of RepRegen’s business strategy is to work with licensees who could incorporate the company’s technology into their products. Licensing, says Brown, is one way to ensure that the company’s products reach the market as quickly as possible.

The product stream also includes strontium doped bioactive glass materials that could be suitable for toothpaste for people with sensitive teeth. Brown says that this is one area where RepRegen is likely to opt for a licensing strategy rather than product development on its own account.