Kidswell Bio Corporation and Treehill Partners are creating a new US-based regenerative medicine company, Kidswell USA.
It is being formed to accelerate the development of Kidswell’s cell therapy pipeline, currently targeting cerebral palsy (CP) as a lead indication.
It is estimated that the prevalence of CP in the US is 1 in 345 children. The NIH reports that approximately 8,000 to 12,000 infants born each year develop the condition. Currently, only symptomatic treatments are available for CP patients. This underscores the need for new disease modifying therapeutics. Kidswell is pioneering the development of stem cells derived from human exfoliated deciduous teeth (SHED) as a regenerative therapy platform. The company said its lead programme, SQ-SHED, has already shown strong initial signals of clinical efficacy in CP.
Kidswell and Treehill have selected Thermo Fisher Scientific as their development service partner.
“Kidswell is seeking to develop its most innovative therapies for the US market, and to accelerate this process we have selected partners that will enable us to jointly create a clinical development roadmap,” said Shinya Kurebayashi, president and CEO of Kidswell Bio Corporation.
“This roadmap will provide the best opportunities for success with the most financially efficient routes, and provide therapies that are commercially viable for the market. This will result in new therapies for underserved indications where patients have few alternative therapeutic options. Partnering with Treehill and leveraging the Thermo Fisher US infrastructure enables us to combine established expertise, senior leadership and corporate strategy, as well as market-focused drug development to navigate into, and through the clinic towards commercialization.”
“Too many promising therapies fail unnecessarily in clinical development or never reach patients due to inefficient development pathways and poor capital discipline,” said Ali Pashazadeh, CEO and founder of Treehill Partners.
“Treehill was built to address this through our Clinical Development Optimisation model, which is designed to accelerate timelines, optimise capital deployment, and increase the probability of regulatory and commercial success. Partnering with Kidswell will speed up the advancement of its cell therapy for paediatric cerebral palsy, a programme with meaningful clinical potential and significant unmet need. This collaboration adds another high-quality asset to Treehill’s growing portfolio, where we apply strategic development expertise to efficiently progress therapies toward approval and value-creating commercialisation.”