A Birmingham biotech company is using $392,000 in grant funding to develop a biologic material to reduce infection and scarring after knee replacement surgery.
Endomimetics, a local early-stage bio-medical device company founded in 2016, was awarded $292,000 as part of the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in November 2023 and $100,000 from Innovate Alabama on July 9.
The combined funds were granted to Endomimetics to help fund development of its Bionanomatrix orthopedic implant coating, which aims to reduce infection and abnormal scarring following knee arthroplasty or a knee replacement.
The SBIR funding is a Phase One grant, which Endomimetics CEO Joe Garner said involved demonstrating that the Bionanomatrix coating he and his team are developing is technologically viable and commercially valuable.
“They are actually looking to make sure that there is a technology here that has commercial value that not only can improve the life of patients at the end of the day but also be a driving engine for the biotechnology economy in the state,” Garner said.
Osteoarthritis, a degenerative joint disease affecting more than 32 million Americans, is most commonly treated with knee arthroplasty. Though this procedure greatly improves quality of life for patients, 2% of procedures can result in infection and up to 10% can result in abnormal scarring.
The Bionanomatrix technology is a multifunctional, nitric oxide and antibiotic-loaded liposomes-releasing coating for cobalt-chromium knee implants. According to Garner, this technology was born from the work of biomedical engineers from UAB, which Endomimetics is currently licensing.
If Phase One of the grant is successful, they can then apply for Phase Two, which would provide Endomimetics up to $2 million to expand on the development already made.
“What (Phase Two) really allows you to do is take the data set that you've created and expand dramatically on that,” Garner said. “It also allows you to build the commercial case for the technology. Everybody wants to come out of surgery and... hear from the physician, ‘Everything went perfectly right.’ Hopefully, for the next several months as you heal from that surgery, it will continue to go perfectly, but unfortunately, we know that's not always the case. If we can dramatically reduce those instances of infection, that would be a win not only for the company but for the patients as well.”
Garner said he is excited about the grants from NIH and Innovate Alabama and sees the funding as another step in strengthening Birmingham’s biotech and innovation ecosystem.
"A lot more companies are being founded in the state and are staying here and one of the big reasons for that is that supplemental grant from Innovate Alabama,” Garner said. “There are a lot of states around us that offered similar programs and for a little while, we were losing companies to those states because of that financial attraction; now, we're not losing that intellectual property, both from a technology standpoint and a human resources standpoint as well.”
Garner also said that UAB's acquisition of Ascension St. Vincent’s hospital system will strengthen the medical science field for Endomimetics and for the broader Alabama medical science ecosystem.
“That industry sector is such a draw for talent, both medically and scientifically, that it makes our job easier to recruit quality employees,” said Garner. “Also, that infrastructure is absolutely needed to make sure that you can get these technologies to the marketplace because we have clinical resources that are literally right next door to us. We can communicate with our scientists, communicate with the physicians, communicate with the surgical teams and the companies that wouldn’t be here without those large organizations.”
