Aug 31, 2023

Priyanka Dutta-Passecker is the CEO and Founder of Healiva, a Swiss start-up focused on innovative treatments for acute and chronic wounds. Healiva begins the process by cleaning the wound using an enzyme invented by Priyanka.  Depending on the severity of the wound, autologous or allogeneic cell therapy is used to make new skin to heal the wound.

Priyanka explains, "So, to give a background for when we talk about personalized cell therapies and autologous cell therapy. We take a patient here, and from the patient, we make the patient's skin. That means that we're completely personalizing and making the skin of the patient. And this is given to extremely chronic non-healing wound patients like venous leg ulcer patients or diabetic foot ulcer patients. The skin gets integrated on their ulcer and closes the ulcer. That's one of our autologous cell therapy products called Epidex."

"We do keep the primary cells when we take the hair follicle. As you may know, hair follicles are epithelial cells that we expand, and we keep the cells. And when they come back, we can make the full skin, the epidermis differentiation, within two weeks. But generally, it takes four weeks. And it's given to the patient once it's ready within four to five days."

"So, just to elaborate on what we mean by allogeneic cell therapy. So quite different from the autologous one, in allogenic cell therapy, we are taking healthy skin cells from you and me. We expand the skin cells, and we give the skin cells to the patient. What happens is that it releases growth factors which help in the healing. And there is no rejection because, of course, the cells do not stay on the wounds of the patient."

#Healiva #WoundCare #PatientCare #SwissStartups #CellTherapy #ChronicWounds #RegenerativeMedicine #Diabetes #Healthtech

healiva.com

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