Cell technologies can reduce the cost by one tenth of the conventional medicine: Dr Pradeep Mahajan

Dr Pradeep Mahajan, CMD, StemRX Bio Science Solutions, in conversation with ETHealthworld discusses the advent and impact of cellular therapy. Edited excerpts:

How is cellular therapy different from other conventional therapies?
Cellular therapy is a newer concept in science. It has come into existence because the conventional sciences have failed treating many of the diseases. We are here to create a parallel thinking on why we are failing, I call it the stage of health crisis, where we need to think about newer concepts and that is how cellular philosophy came into my mind. We started working on it thereby to create the molecules which can treat the conventional failing sciences.

We are talking of cell technologies which are going to reduce cost, it can reduce the cost by one tenth of the conventional medicine. When we are talking about sustainability we are to see how we scale the production of the living cells, if we cannot scale those cells the results are not possible because the disease ratio is high and we require billions of these molecules. So scalability and cost reduction is very important.



How about side effects?
Looking at the side effects and safety of these drug molecules, these molecules when compared to any other molecule is most safe and effective because it is going to work with the environment of your body. It senses what happens around you, releases cytokines, chemokines to repair the systems which are failing. Now in such conditions molecules are directly tried on human diseases in a dish model, where the human diseases could be created from the stem cells and they can be tried by the drug molecules. As the side effect doesn't come in the picture at all the molecules which are developed from the pharma. We’ll also have minimum side effects when we use stem cells to research drug model. Whereas when we talk about autologous stem cells of your own body to repair being their own adult stem cells they don’t have any side effects for you. So side effects ratio is zero when compared to any other drug molecule.

How can this molecule reach the common man?
When we have scalability, we reduce the cost and it can treat almost all undesirable, devastating conditions which are reaching the common man. So you can imagine the strength of this molecule to change the science for medicine.

How will this impact conventional medicine?
Today we have more than 2000-3000 types of diseases where none of the conventional therapies work and in the ratio we are putting in billion dollar volume of money in research and we don't have a single molecule that is coming in to treat molecules. In such cases this is a sensing science which works with the micro environment because they are living breathing entities so they sense what is going on, as they do the repairing, regenerating job and not treating the science and symptoms which were being treated by conventional drugs. So thereby it is a big impact on failing system and brings in the science which can bring the solution to almost all non treatable challenging diseases.

How about regulatory requirements?
For anything that comes as a treatment or therapy, regulations are very important. When you are using this molecule as a drug molecule and bringing as a standard of healthcare for them then the regulatory policies are going to be very important and they have to decide the standardisation and quality of the drug: How to maintain the drug? How to reach to the people with the same potency? So there are many challenges and opportunities in this science.

Your contribution?
We have patented two technologies in regenerative medicine. One is application of osteoconductive potential of stem cells from the bone marrow to generate the joints which are degenerating, particularly the hip joint. There is a patent which has been applied internationally and nationally which is published presently and is going to be sanctioned within a year’s time. A lot of contribution has also been done on osteoarthritis, avascular necrosis..