You get the sense that Dr. David Masters, whose career includes stints at the Harvard Medical School and the Mayo Clinic, would have preferred that his first tissue-replacement product was a blood-vessel graft for cardiovascular treatments, or perhaps a stent coating to prevent blood clots and encourage biocompatibility.
But a start-up often has to follow a different direction than it originally intended to take.
In 1999, Masters founded Gel-Del Technologies atop his platform technology, a patented process that uses proteins and other natural biochemicals to make structures that simulate the body’s tissue. The St. Paul company’s flagship product is CosmetaLife, a material that is injected into the skin to integrate with it and smooth facial wrinkles. While Gel-Del had a number of product ideas under consideration, it put CosmetaLife at the front of the line for development primarily because the size of the market for this kind of product is about $900 million.
“For us, as a small start-up company, it was very doable” to commercialize CosmetaLife, Masters says. In February, CosmetaCorp, a subsidiary of Gel-Del, struck an agreement with California-based Coapt Systems. Coapt will pay CosmetaCorp $15 million for rights to sell CosmetaCorp products.
Masters says that while the leading anti-wrinkle tissue filler tends to dissolve over time, “ours does not dissolve. Those particles we inject into you will recruit cells that rejuvenate the skin, and those cells will change our material over to natural skin.”
CosmetaLife is expected to enter the market by the end of 2007. Meanwhile, Gel-Del will continue to develop what looks to be its next product, a blood-vessel graft that Masters says would be the first artificial device used for cardiovascular bypass procedures. Right now, surgeons must use a section of one of a patient’s own blood vessels to repair a damaged coronary artery. There are only four sites within the body from which doctors can harvest grafts.
“The other problem is that those veins don’t last forever,” says Masters, who adds that Gel-Del’s graft material encourages cell growth, thus allowing the human tissue to integrate with the implant. Gel-Del recently received a $2.1 million grant through the National Institutes of Health Small-Business Innovation Research program to develop the graft. Says Masters, “We’re transitioning from technology to product.”
