Jessica Whited, an assistant professor of stem cell and regenerative biology at Harvard University, is considered a world expert on axolotl salamanders.
For years she has studied how these amphibians, with their small smiles and frilly gills, reproduce tissue for scarless wound-healing and limb regeneration.
“Not only do they regenerate the limb, but they also don’t form scars. So you can’t see the junction between the old limb and the new limb,” said Whited, who studied biological sciences and philosophy at the University of Missouri before obtaining her Ph.D. in biology from MIT.
Initially, she had focused her academic work on limb regeneration. But then one day, her young son suffered a face injury from a biking accident. The doctors were able to help with treatment for his fractured nose and concussion. But Whited said they couldn’t do much about the scarring he would have on his face.
“We got set up with a really great pediatric plastic surgeon at Children’s Hospital, and she was fantastic, but knowing what I knew about scarring already, I was very concerned about what they were going to tell me, which was that it’s unavoidable,” Whited said. “And I knew that from a scientific standpoint, but it hit really hard as his mom.”
After this experience, Whited decided to use her knowledge of axolotl salamanders to help people with scar healing. She co-founded Matice Biosciences to advance this technology and her goal is to produce commercial products to help people with injuries recover without lasting scars.
Whited’s son is not alone in his challenges with healing scars. Typically, human cells aren’t the best at healing wounds scar-free for a few reasons, Whited said. Human cells don’t quickly fill in a space that’s been created by a wound. Injured cells in humans also tend to take longer to go from an inflammatory response to an anti-inflammatory response. Humans skin also retains bumps on areas of scarring. On the other hand, axolotl salamanders avoid all of these problems.
“The company is basically premised on the idea that (axolotl salamanders) are making molecules during the process of limb regeneration or other instances of scar-free healing that could serve as instructions for human cells,” White said.
Matice is trying to computationally identify which molecules “super regenerators,” such as axolotl salamanders, are making that are most likely to allow humans to also regrow tissue without scars. Whited said this is a vegan process — the researchers pull information on the salamanders from public databases. Then, the company aims to synthesize these molecules and test them on human cells in the lab.
The information about which molecules worked and which did not is fed back into the company's computational algorithm so it can more quickly determine which properties are driving the desired outcomes on human cells.
Whited's son had his bike accident about five years ago. Since then, Matice has been building a team, bringing on people like Jonathan Wolfson, founder and CEO of Solazyme, as co-founder and chairman of Matice, and Brandy Hoffman as chief operating officer. They also hired a small research team to work in a shared lab space in Cambridge. In total, Matice has 10 full-time employees.
Whited said the company will first focus on scar-healing treatments consumers could purchase at a drugstore for smaller injuries or get ahead of a planned surgery.
Hoffman said the company is heavily in the discovery phase. They're vetting thousands and thousands of peptides and optimizing them for further testing.
“We’re definitely continuing to expand our platform and we’re also expanding our testing. So we’re getting more candidates, more experiments run, so that we can get top-tier results,” Hoffman said.
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