Aspen Neuroscience, a San Diego biotech that’s developing cell replacement therapy to treat Parkinson’s disease, has raised $147.5 million in a second round of venture capital funding.
While cell therapies for Parkinson’s show promise for regeneration — not just treating the symptoms —-there’s a debate on whether therapies derived from a patient’s own cells are the best path, or whether donor cells would be more cost-effective. Aspen has developed a procedure for turning these pluripotent stem cells into dopamine-releasing neurons, which then would be introduced back into the patient in hopes of replacing neurons damaged by Parkinson’s.Before that, however, each patient’s stem cell-derived dopamine neurons would be evaluated for effectiveness using proprietary artificial intelligence-based genomics tools.