PORTEFEUILLE

At present, around 2 million women are diagnosed with breast cancer each year worldwide, 500’000 of whom in Europe. These patients increasingly resort to reconstructive surgeries after tumour resection to regain their natural and healthy physical appearance. Unfortunately, today, the available techniques are either too strenuous, induce a long-term foreign body reaction, require repeated surgeries or do not bring durable results. In addition, a high number of patients are not eligible to one of these techniques and remain in the therapeutic impasse. Covered by health insurances, the reconstructive surgeries performed need to evolve. In particular, minimally invasive surgery could come close to the dream of repairing the human body without a visible trace.
To make this possible for millions of patients, we develop the «AdiPearl therapy». It will enable a simple, ambulatory and physiological breast reconstruction, restoring bodily look and self-esteem after a devastating diagnosis.
Our innovation is at the convergence of cell therapy, tissue engineering and materials science. We have taken advantage of the most advanced porous biomaterial technology, which is the fruit of several years of our research, to provide an innovative concept: a dynamic biomaterial enabling persistent volume repair.

The innovation started when we met with plastic surgeons who were trying to find a gap in their clinical practice to help their patients to heal quicker. To answer to this high unmet need, we gathered from very early stages of development a complementary team associating engineers, biologists and clinicians. This unique configuration allowed us to both acquire a fundamental understanding of the biological phenomenon in tissue reconstruction and to design and engineer a pertinent solution based on a biomaterial, with clinical and business transfer perspective.

We validated the clinical pertinence for this biomaterial-based tissue engineering therapy with plastic and reconstructive surgeons in Europe and in US.
We designed and validated preclinically the performance and safety of the product. The preclinical results will be directly usable for obtaining the approval to launch the product on the European market.
We have developed our IP portfolio.
We created the start-up company Volumina Medical SA and performed a first round of investment. The team grew from 3 to 10 FTE.
In addition to the support from the Gebert Rüf Stiftung, the project obtained the support from the Foundation for Technological Innovation in 2015 and obtained the PERL prize in 2017 (Prix Entreprendre Region Lausanne). We obtained the support from Venture Kick (Stage I, II and III) and from Innosuisse.

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