Businessweek

InVivo Therapeutics Holdings Corp., a development stage company, focuses on developing and commercializing biopolymer scaffolding devices for the treatment of spinal cord injuries. The company’s biopolymer-based devices are surgically implanted or injected into the lesion created during traumatic injury, or the ‘primary injury’. Additional applications of its platform technologies include the potential treatment for, spinal cord injury following tumor removal, peripheral nerve damage, and postsurgical treatment of any transected nerve. Products The company focuses on developing biocompatible polymer scaffolding devices to treat acute spinal cord injuries; biocompatible hydrogel for local controlled release of methylprednisolone to treat acute spinal cord injuries; and biocompatible polymer scaffolding devices seeded with autologous human neural stem cells to treat acute and chronic spinal cord injuries. The company’s biopolymer scaffolding has been designed to prevent and mitigate the cascading inflammatory response or secondary injury and its device is intended to perform four functions: fill the necrotic lesion to minimize secondary injury, which may occur by inhibiting cell-cell signaling via inflammatory cytokines; bridge the gap formed by the lesion, providing a matrix designed to promote regrowth and reorganization of neural elements (neurons and neurites); act as a synthetic extracellular matrix, with the goal of promoting survival of surrounding neurons; and reduce scar formation (astrogliosis). The company's injectable hydrogel is designed to counteract the inflammatory environment that results during a secondary injury from a closed-wound spinal cord injury where further cell death occurs. This product is designed to deliver the anti-inflammatory steroid methylprednisolone sodium succinate. The company's polymer scaffold seeded with autologous human neural stem cells is intended to counteract the pathophysiology of spinal cord injury by: replacing lost cells of the spinal cord; and activating endogenous regenerative processes, such as the formation of new synapses and axonal sprouting based on molecules the stem cells produce. History InVivo Therapeutics Holdings Corp. was founded in 2005.