EP #444 - Priyanka Dutta Passecker: What If You Healed Chronic Wounds With a Spray?
Oct 9, 2024
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Priyanka Dutta Passecker, co-founder and CEO of Healiva, discusses her extraordinary journey from neuroscience to biotech. She highlights the staggering statistics surrounding chronic wounds and the critical need for innovative solutions. Priyanka reveals how Healiva utilizes codfish enzymes in a groundbreaking spray treatment for chronic wounds, aiming to make personalized therapies affordable. She also shares her experiences as an immigrant entrepreneur and the complexities of navigating the biotech landscape.
Priyanka Dutta Passecker emphasizes the necessity for innovative and affordable chronic wound treatments to enhance patient care and healing outcomes.
The podcast highlights the complex challenges biotech startups face, including long development cycles and regulatory hurdles in bringing new therapies to market.
Deep dives
The Challenge of Chronic Wounds
Chronic wounds pose a significant health issue, affecting an estimated 156 million patients globally. A staggering 70% of these patients may never heal, resulting in lifelong open wounds that require continuous management. Among diabetic populations, approximately 30% of individuals with chronic wounds face amputations due to the severity of their conditions. This highlights the urgent need for innovative treatment solutions within the healthcare sector.
Innovative Solutions for Wound Care
Hia Laiva, a biotech startup, harnesses advanced cell therapy and innovative enzymes to provide new treatment methods for acute and chronic wounds. Their approach involves using a non-mammalian enzyme derived from fish waste, which can clean wounds efficiently and painlessly, avoiding traditional methods such as maggot therapy. This enzyme, combined with personalized treatments based on individual patient needs, aims to significantly improve healing outcomes. By targeting both cleaning and tissue regeneration, Hia Laiva seeks to offer a comprehensive solution to chronic wound management.
Focus on Affordability and Accessibility
One of Hia Laiva's core missions is to make their therapies both effective and financially accessible to patients. They focus on utilizing low-cost raw materials, like fish-derived enzymes, to reduce the overall cost of wound care products. Additionally, they aim to create a product lineup that addresses various stages of wound healing, thereby minimizing healthcare costs associated with chronic wounds. This strategy is intended to prevent relapses and reduce hospital visits, ultimately leading to a more sustainable healthcare model.
Navigating the Biotech Landscape
Launching a biotech startup involves intricate challenges, especially with long development cycles and regulatory hurdles. Hia Laiva aims to expedite its go-to-market strategy by acquiring existing late-stage cell therapy products, allowing for quicker entry into the market. The company plans to collaborate with strategic partners to leverage their expertise in distribution and market access, decreasing the time it takes to deliver treatments to patients. This multifaceted approach not only addresses immediate market needs but also sets a foundation for future growth and innovation.
4:19 - Being an immigrant and being an entrepreneur
7:23 - Convincing your boss to help you start a startup
10:30 - What are chronic wounds?
16:10 - Making personalized therapies affordable
24:00 - The long development cycles in biotech
About Priyanka Dutta Passecker:
Priyanka Dutta Passecker is the co-founder and CEO of Healiva, a biotech startup using advanced cell therapy to treat acute and chronic wounds. She holds a PhD in Neuroscience from Trinity College Dublin and worked for companies like UCB Pharma, Axol Bioscience Ltd and Bioseutica before starting Healiva in 2020.
2-3% of the elderly suffer from painful venous/arterial leg ulcers and nearly 25% of diabetics may develop diabetic foot ulcers in their lifetimes. This burden is borne by healthcare systems, which spend 2% of their budgets on wound management. Worst of all, about 60% of chronic wounds remain unhealed. That’s why Healiva is such a game changer: they use 3 non-virus-based enzymes from codfish pancreas, which, due to their provenance, are quite stable at room temperature, and therefore can be stored in a liquid form and used as a spray. They’re currently getting ready for pre-clinical studies to prove the safety and efficacy of their product.