InVivo Therapeutics Corporation
Improving the Quality of Life for SCI Patients
Spinal cord injuries (SCI) are devastating to both patients and their families. InVivo Therapeutics is dedicated to finding solutions through research and strategies to treat and improve the quality of life for those living with SCI.
InVivo was founded based on research from Robert S. Langer Sc.D. of MIT’s Langer Lab and Yang (Ted) D. Teng, MD, PhD from Harvard’s Neurosurgery Department and VA Boston’s SCI Research Division. Dr. Langer and Dr. Teng, have worked together for over nine years, publishing their findings in peer reviewed journals, with the focused objective to provide novel therapeutic options for treating acute and chronic spinal cord injuries.
We believe that incremental discoveries are the best opportunity for improving the quality of life for people living with SCI conditions. SCI research should focus not only on single pathological components, but also on strategies that can treat daily clinical challenges through preventing the secondary loss of function and restoring neurophysiology.
Our research toward improving the functional consequences of SCI focuses on a novel progression of neural tissue and chemical engineering to target real clinical issues, including respiration and motor-sensory dysfunction. Our technologies are aimed at preventing further tissue loss at functionally critical loci, maintaining the health of living neural cells, replacing cells that have died through apoptosis or necrosis, growing axons and staging/ensuring functional reconnections/reorganization, and strengthening and reestablishing synapses that restore the neural circuits required for functional recovery, a process often called “neuroplasticity.”
These strategies have led us to a range of experimental therapeutic solutions and priorities for our SCI research, each of which could theoretically be pursued individually or in combination. InVivo Therapeutics focuses on these paths of discovery to expedite a portfolio of products and services, with our focus on meeting the needs of people living with SCI.
Research
- InVivo scientists engineer a drug delivery and tissue engineering method to increase survival of neural stem cells after transplantation into the injured spinal cord
- Design and Fabrication of biocompatible polymer implants suitable for neural tissue engineering, drug delivery and prosthetics.
- Functional recovery following spinal cord injury mediated by novel polymer scaffolds that can be used alone and/or as carriers to administer human neural stem cells.