Empowered Patient Podcast Treating Aging-Related Illnesses with Allogeneic Medicinal Signaling Cells with Wael Hashad Longeveron
Wael Hashad, Chief Executive Officer of Longeveron, is focused on developing cell therapy for aging-related conditions such as aging frailty, dementia, and Alzheimer's disease. Using mesenchymal stem cells, also known as medicinal signaling cells, obtained from healthy donors 18-45, Longeveron is seeing promising results in clinical trials with improvements in brain volume and cognitive function. This approach is also being explored in the pursuit of a treatment for hypoplastic left heart syndrome, a rare congenital heart disease.
Wael explains, "We believe there is a huge unmet need for bringing safe and effective products to try to slow the progression of the disease, improve the quality of life, and reduce the burden on the caregivers of such a disease. As for the aging frailty in general, as you know, with aging, there are a lot of things that affect the vascular system, muscle wasting, and all of those things that affect the quality of life during the aging years of an individual. Anything we can impact to improve the quality of life and the ability to lead a normal life in the aging years is definitely one of our goals."
"Lomecel-B was initially licensed from the University of Miami to Longeveron. It is mesenchymal stem cells. As I said, we get GMP-grade donations of bone marrow from healthy adults and volunteers aged 18 to 45. Then we take this donation, harvest them in our facility in Miami, grow the cells, and then do all the required testing and release criteria to ensure safety. It is allogeneic, meaning that it is off the shelf, that any patient can take these cells. It is not autologous cells. It is allogeneic cells, giving it a much broader application. We are able to produce enough quantities from each donation to support these patients with aging frailty, Alzheimer's, or dementia."
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