Empowered Patient Podcast Selectively Activating the Wnt Pathway to Target Specific Diseases with Craig Parker Surrozen
Craig Parker is the CEO of Surrozen, experts in the Wnt pathway, which is one of the fundamental pathways that help to establish the structure of organs, renewal of stem cells, and recovery from injury. This is a story of discovering the right combination of their tissue-specific approach and the right molecules to enhance or activate the Wnt pathway.
Craig elaborates, "So, in the liver, for example, when we injure our liver by drinking too much alcohol, the Wnt pathway is activated and is really the key pathway that's responsible for the regeneration that we're all able to stimulate in our liver."
"There are many, many other organs where the Wnt pathway is known to play a role in how that particular organ is maintained and responds to injury. So, what we're trying to do is take advantage of that biology that's so important in all of us during development and in adulthood and to stimulate it in a very selective way to get organs like the liver or the intestine or the retina to regenerate in response to the injury that certain diseases caused to that tissue."
"When you have biology that's so powerful, and that is so relevant in different organs, the challenge, really, probably the most fundamental challenge, is to utilize it or activate it only in the tissue that you want, only in the tissue that you're targeting for a specific disease. We don't want to activate this pathway throughout the body. So, it's that selective approach that really distinguishes our technology and our approach, and that was really an impediment to utilizing this pathway over the last 30 years."
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