Regenerative medicine as a therapeutic approach is changing the practice of orthopaedics and dentistry. Rather than replacing bone and cartilage with synthetic alternatives or metal components, regenerative medicine seeks to encourage tissues renewal and repair through the stimulation of natural healing processes.

Scil Technology’s product candidates are targeted at various dental and orthopaedic indications with a high medical need such as dental implantology and periodontal disease or major orthopaedic indications like fractures, cartilage repair, osteoarthritis, and degenerative disc disease.

Today, stimulation of tissue regeneration which is essential for appropriate tissue healing remains a challenge. In bone and cartilage repair, the use of the patient’s own tissue (autologous tissue or an autograft) to stimulate tissue healing is defined as the gold standard in these areas. However, it is well known that the use of autograft is often correlated with various drawbacks for clinical use, including the risk and inconvenience for the patient associated with a second surgical intervention and limited efficacy in critical cases.

Scil is therefore focusing on the development of specific growth factor(s) combined with biodegradable substituting material that is able to induce tissue healing as an effective alternative to autologous grafting.

Dental products

Scil Technology’s dental product candidates are targeted at dental implantology and periodontal disease. Both are different in their therapeutic goal: where the objective of dental implantology is the aesthetic replacement of missing teeth, treatment of periodontal disease aims at the preservation of teeth. However, both fields require products for tissue restoration, namely bone, soft tissue and/or periodontal ligament.

Orthopaedic products

Scil Technology is developing products targeted at two of the largest segments for bone formation in orthopaedics: spinal fusions and fractures/trauma. Both therapeutic areas lend themselves well to Scil’s approach of developing innovative biomaterials with or without protein coatings.

In the area of cartilage repair, Scil Technology has two programmes targeting the treatment of osteochondral defects resulting from traumatic joint injury or osteoarthritis.  Currently, no tissue regenerative products are available to effectively induce the renewal of cartilage from patients suffering from osteochondral defects or osteoatthritis. Recently, a License Agreement has been reached with Pfizer Inc for further development of these two programmes.