The leader of a University of Southampton spin-out company has been awarded a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship to support her work in using nanoclay gel technology to transform orthopaedic surgery.
Renovos, based at the Southampton Science Park, is the pioneer of gel, which allows a 100x lower dose of powerful regenerative therapeutic agent to be precisely delivered and localised to the sites where needed.
Dr Agnieszka Janeczek, CEO of Renovos, will use the Fellowship to continue this work to provide more evidence that the injectable gels can also deliver therapeutic cells, to improve bone healing and cartilage tissue regeneration. Nanoclays can hold these regenerative cells in place while providing the environment they need to grow, and to gradually replace the gels with healed tissue.
The need for long-term tissue regeneration technologies is ever increasing with both an aging population and younger, more active demographics, damaging their tissues through sports.
Dr Janeczek said: 鈥淚 am extremely thrilled to have been awarded the prestigious UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship. This fellowship will allow me to further innovate in the space of nanoclay materials, focussing on cell delivery, and is an amazing opportunity to expand my team and initiate new collaborations.
鈥淭his award will help realise my vision towards the use of these industrial materials for medical applications across the wider regenerative medicine field, which has been striving for truly innovative technologies and better understanding of their effectiveness.鈥�
Dr Janeczek鈥檚 Fellowship is part of a package of awards totalling 拢98 million to tackle global issues and commercialise innovations.
UKRI Chief Executive, Professor Dame Ottoline Leyser, said: 鈥淭he Future Leaders Fellowships provide researchers and innovators with the freedom and generous long-term support to progress adventurous new ideas, and to move across disciplinary boundaries and between academia and industry.
鈥淭he fellows announced today provide shining examples of the talented researchers and innovators across every discipline attracted to pursue their ideas in universities and businesses throughout the UK, with the potential to deliver transformative research that can be felt across society and the economy.鈥�
Renovos was founded in 2017 by聽Dr Janeczek alongside Professor Richard Oreffo,听Dr Jon Dawson聽 and Mr James Otter.
Professor Oreffo said: 鈥淭he UKRI Future聽Leaders Fellowships are extremely prestigious awards and testament to the exciting research vision to harness nanoclays for cell therapy proposed by Dr Janeczek. We are delighted to collaborate on this ground-breaking research programme with the University of Southampton spin out Renovos Biologics Limited in helping to deliver innovative regenerative medicine solutions for an increasing aging population.鈥�
Dr Dawson added: 鈥淩enovos was spun out from the University of Southampton in 2017 with the goal of translating to the clinic the exciting potential of nanoclay for regenerative medicine. Agnieszka, now CEO of Renovos, has been the driving聽force behind our progress towards this goal. This fiercely competitive award recognises Agnieszka鈥檚 standing as one of the UK鈥檚 most promising leaders in science and enterprise and provides a fantastic opportunity for us to collaborate with Renovos in support of Agnieszka’s vision to harness nanoclay gels for stem cell delivery in bone and cartilage repair.鈥�
