CartilaGen earns key early stage funding and recognition from Wellmark and MATTER
IOWA CITY, Iowa, Oct. 1, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The world's first preventative therapy for post-traumatic osteoarthritis (PTOA), currently being commercialized by medical startup CartilaGen, received the support of Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield and MATTER last month.
Wellmark Blue Cross Blue Shield, which funds projects improving healthcare in Iowa and South Dakota, dedicated $100,000 to CartilaGen in the month of September. This award will bolster CartilaGen's development of its preventive solution for PTOA at a crucial time as the company is set to begin its first in-human clinical trial.
Medical startup incubator MATTER has also added its name to the growing list of CartilaGen's partners. One of the September additions to MATTER's community of over 200 cutting-edge healthcare startups and 60 corporate partners, CartilaGen, as a global member, will receive vital mentorship and guidance from MATTER that will propel it into the next stages of product development.
"CartilaGen is very excited to have the institutional backing of Wellmark. Their unique combination of both financial and advisory support will prove strong contributions to CartilaGen's commercialization effort," says Jaison Marks, CEO and founder of CartilaGen. "Additionally, we are very honored to join the MATTER community. Collaborating with MATTER's network of healthcare innovators will certainly accelerate the development of CartilaGen and our novel therapeutic towards the fulfillment of a major unmet medical need."
PTOA is a profoundly debilitating condition that affects approximately 3% of the entire United States population annually. It is an aggressive form of osteoarthritis that results from traumatic joint injury, has devastating effects on patients, and current treatment options are limited and ineffective before end-stage joint replacement.
CartilaGen, with the help of Wellmark and MATTER, seeks to change this paradigm. CartilaGen has the only solution that effectively targets and prevents the earliest stage of PTOA development by modifying the underlying disease mechanism in an easily performed, cost-effective manner. To date, CartilaGen's technology has previously received funding from the John Pappajohn Entrepreneurial Center and the US Department of Defense.
About CartilaGen, Inc.: A privately held, Iowa-based company, CartilaGen is developing an intra-articular injection of a small-molecule drug capable of preventing post-traumatic osteoarthritis. CartilaGen's solution aims to provide an unprecedented disease-modifying treatment to an area of medicine that has been particularly devoid of any efficacious preventative or curative therapies.
For more information, visit www.cartilagen.com or contact [email protected].
SOURCE CartilaGen, Inc.
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