A Medical Device Daily

Stratatech (Madison, Wisconsin), a company focused on developing human skin substitutes reported that it will get a $500,000 loan and a $250,000 grant from the Commerce Department’s Technology Development fund.

The company was founded in 2000 by B. Lynn Allen-Hoffman, the company’s CEO. The company has 24 employees and one product in clinical trials.

The product is a skin substitute that may have the ability to heal wounds on burn victims, and help with diabetic ulcers and bedsores, said Robert Barnard, the company’s vice president and treasurer.

The company’s core technology is based on discoveries made in Allen-Hoffman’s lab. Over two decades, Allen-Hoffman derived a cell line from infant skin cells that can be grown indefinitely. From that, Stratatech can produce a multilayered skin substitute with the physical strength and biological characteristics of intact human skin.

The company has an exclusive license from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation for the patented technology. The foundation, known as WARF, is a shareholder in Stratatech, Barnard said.

Stratatech earlier this month received a $1.5 million grant from the National Institute on Aging to develop a genetically enhanced skin tissue product that would stimulate the growth of blood vessels into chronic ulcers to hasten their healing.

In contract offerings: Simulations Plus (Lancaster, California) a leading provider of software for pharmaceutical discovery and development, yesterday reported that it has received a purchase order from the U.S. National Institutes of Health for its best-in-class ClassPharmer software product.

“It’s been a busy final week of our fourth fiscal quarter. This license for the National Institutes of Health follows an earlier announcement of the FDA licenses for GastroPlus and DDDPlus, and it adds another important government agency to our list of customers,” said Ron Creeley, vice president of marketing and sales for Simulations Plus. “We believe these agencies serve as trend-setting organizations and examples to companies who work in pharmaceutical research and development.”

Walt Woltosz, CEO and chairman of Simulations Plus, said “We acquired ClassPharmer 3.5 and ChemTK almost two years ago, and merged them into the new ClassPharmer 4.X versions. The dramatic improvement in performance of the new version has caught the attention of chemists worldwide, and ClassPharmer is now a major contributor to our revenues and earnings. We have evolved its capabilities into molecule design as well, with the release earlier this year of the R-Table Exploder feature.

“Together with our ADMET Predictor software, the combination now enables chemists to evaluate molecules they have already synthesized, as well as to automatically generate new molecules and evaluate them for a variety of important properties,” said Woltosz. “We believe our continuously evolving capability to design new molecules in conjunction with ADMET estimation is an effective formula for fueling the growth of Simulations Plus.”

Simulations Plus is a developer of drug discovery and development software, which is licensed to and used in the conduct of drug research by pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and drug delivery companies worldwide.