Gene therapies in the knee? With the help of a small herd of horses, a new startup hopes to crack osteoarthritis
Running preclinical animal studies in mice, rats and rabbits is par for the course in biotech, but horses? Usually too big and too expensive. But it turns out horses have one major advantage for musculoskeletal researchers: As large mammals, their knee joints are big enough to provide a meaningful comparison to human patients.
That’s why a new gene therapy startup out of Palo Alto, CA, dubbed Genascence, used more than 50 of the animals in an early test for its osteoarthritis candidate. Running tests on horses provided the earliest clues on structural improvement and pain reduction — horses don’t limp unless they’re feeling pain, CEO Thomas Chalberg tells me — that Genascence is now hoping to replicate for the first time in humans.
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