2024-03-20
Announces launch of their new advanced therapies analytics company, QVance.
This week, the NextCell Pharma team (shown) celebrates 10 years since its inception in 2014! This happens within a week of the announcement of the launch of their new quality analytics company. QVance, a name born out of the company’s vision to provide quality services for developers of advanced therapies, is a spin-off of the parent company, NextCell Pharma.
NextCell´s key business lies within its drug development program today. The company developed its own umbilical cord derived mesenchymal cell therapy, ProTrans, providing a novel approach to the treatment of autoimmune and inflammatory disorders. This product has been the subject of five clinical trials to date, with their primary indication type-1 diabetes (REF), for which the three year follow up demonstrated disease altering phenomenon and slowing of disease progression. The 5 year longitudinal study data is expected in spring this year.
In 2021, a Phase I paediatric clinical trial in newly diagnosed type-1 diabetes was commenced at Uppsala University Hospital and Uppsala University, and was completed in summer 2023. The Phase II component of this trial commenced later in the year, with the second age cohort treatment commencing autumn 2024. In 2021 NextCell initiated a Phase I clinical trial for the treatment of viral induced pneumonia at Örebro University Hospital and a Phase II investigator led clinical trial in partnership with McGill University Health Centre in Montreal, Canada for severe pneumonia associated with COVID-19 infection.
While NextCell Pharma is advanced in the clinical applications of their technology, launch of QVance comes as a response to the growing unmet need for analytics within ATMPs. NextCell Pharma has felt this pain point themselves, “as we moved our product towards Phase III development, we saw the difficulty for ATMP developers like ourselves to access quality services locally. While suppliers are available, there is a need to qualify multiple vendors and products must ultimately be shipped over central Europe and the UK for actual testing. This is a huge bottleneck for those working in the Nordics with small batch sizes and limited product available for QC testing,” explained Mathias Svahn, CEO for NextCell Pharma.
“QVance aims to address these issues by positioning itself as a “one-stop shop” analytics company based in Huddinge, Sweden”, says Lindsay Davies, CSO for NextCell Pharma. The company aims to leverage its strong Nordic routes and understanding of the cell therapy field to provide developers with tailored analytical solutions.
We congratulate NextCell on reaching these latest milestones and look forward to building Swedish ATMP capabilities together.
For further information regarding NextCell Pharma or QVance, contact info@nextcellpharma.com
Reference
1 Umbilical cord-derived mesenchymal stromal cells preserve endogenous insulin production in type 1 diabetes: a Phase I/II randomised double-blind placebo-controlled trial Per-Ola Carlsson, Daniel Espes, Sofia Sisay, Lindsay C. Davies, C. I. Edvard Smith & Mathias G. Svahn Volume 66, pages 1431–1441, (2023) Diabetologia