GelSana: Making a Material Impact on Advancing Wound Care
What the Company Does
GelSana engineers highly elastic wound dressing polymers which stretch and conform across any wound, reduce inflammation through polymer chemistry, prevent infection, and provide sustained drug delivery over time.
Current Landscape
The largest concern with chronic wounds is the inability to heal due to high inflammation. GelSana dressings address this problem with their unique anti-inflammatory properties. Diabetic ulcers can be treated with a complicated series of wet and dry dressing changes; in severe cases surgeons will resort to skin grafting to try to prevent amputation. Care providers want faster healing with less scarring, easier-to-handle dressing options, and sustained release of therapeutics over time.
The advanced wound care product market is controlled by competitors that include 3M, Smith+Nephew, Coloplast, and Cardinal Health. The market is plagued with a multiplicity of similar formulations; none has emerged as a market leader based on similarity of strengths and weaknesses including the inability to make a material impact on wound healing.
Unlike competing products, GelSana polymers are comprised of materials that promote an anti-inflammatory environment. Upcoming formulations stabilize and provide sustained delivery of therapeutics to the wound environment, offering a major advantage over existing products and preventing the need for continual repeated application (easier for the patient and more cost effective).
Company Birth Story
GelSana CEO and Founder Melissa Krebs, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Chemical & Biological Engineering at Colorado School of Mines. She has authored more than 50 manuscripts on biopolymers for controlled therapeutic delivery and systems for regenerative medicine. Her lab at Colorado School of Mines developed these wound-healing materials and she established GelSana at Fitzsimons Innovation Community in Aurora, Colorado, to commercialize and bring these promising materials to the clinic.
Solution
This proprietary hydrogel, made from a market-first polymer, prevents foreign body response with anti-inflammatory, pro-healing functions. These gels have applicability across multiple wound types beyond diabetic ulcers, including pressure ulcers and burns.
GelSana’s first commercial wound dressing hydrogel, CleragelTM, will be clinically launched in 2025. Future products will be formulated to deliver therapeutics in a sustained manner over time, eliminating the need to continually reopen the wound bed to reapply therapeutics. These gels are anticipated to be a valuable tool to combat any wounds that are showing limited response to other healing solutions.
GelSana has finalized the formulation and packaging of its first product, with manufacturing now well underway, heading towards FDA registration.
Customer Impact
“These hydrogels are stretchable, elastic, and inherently anti-inflammatory which makes them very different from what we have currently available on the clinical market. Also, the opportunity to deliver growth factors in a sustained manner over time would have significant impact for difficult-to-heal chronic wounds that need an additional push towards healing.” – John James, MD, FACS, Chair of Surgery, Trauma Medical Director, ICU Surgical Director, Castle Rock Adventist Hospital
Founder Quote
“GelSana is bringing an entirely new class of materials to the wound care field to truly make a significant advancement in wound care technology, improving outcomes and quality of life for patients around the world.”
Melissa Krebs, Ph.D., CEO and Founder, GelSana
Learn More
Website: gelsanatherapeutics.com
LinkedIn: @gelsana