VERIGRAFT to use AI to increase quality of vascular grafts

• Joint project with University of Skövde receives SEK 6 million Swedish governmental grant
• Aim to enable scalability and increase patient access to personalized veins & arteries

Gothenburg, December 14, 2023: Swedish tissue therapy company VERIGRAFT today announced that along with the University of Skövde, SciCross and RISE, it is the joint recipient of a SEK 6 million grant from Sweden’s innovation agency Vinnova to develop an AI-based method to increase quality of graft manufacturing. 

VERIGRAFT has developed a pioneering technique that uses autologous components from the recipient’s blood to create personalized tissue-engineered veins (P-TEV) that can be implanted without the need for immunosuppressive drugs.  The Company is currently applying these grafts in the TECVI-1 first-in-man clinical trial in patients with chronic venous insufficiency (CVI).

In the new project due to run through to October 2026, researchers will gather data about genes, cells, proteins, and other factors from the recipient's healthy vessels and various stages of the blood vessel production. In addition, data from both prior to implantation and one year after transplantation will be collected. The datasets will then be used to train an AI-model to understand patterns in the information and help predict manufacturing quality parameters. The goal is to use the method in the future during the manufacturing process and to accelerate product release for transplantation into a patient.

“We are delighted to participate in this project since our long-term aim is develop personalized vein and artery grafts at scale and with highest quality,” says VERIGRAFT CEO Petter Björquist. “The data gathered in this project will also help us move towards 3D printing of graft scaffolds.”

"Our goal is to come up with improved AI tools that are digitalised and scalable for industrial production lines of ATMPs such as VERIGRAFTS’s tissue grafts. This will help patients gain access to new and promising treatments," says Jane Synnergren, project leader and Professor in Bioinformatics, University of Skövde.

For more information, please contact:

Petter Björquist, CEO VERIGRAFT

Email: petter.bjorquist@verigraft.com

About VERIGRAFT

VERIGRAFT is a biotechnology company based in Gothenburg, Sweden. The company is rooted in the Karolinska Institute, based on groundbreaking basic science with a focus on regenerative medicine since 2014.

VERIGRAFT has grown to become a forerunner in industrialized tissue engineering and advanced regenerative medicine. The company has a strategically focused R&D pipeline of personalized tissues, targeting areas such as cardiovascular and neuronal disease. VERIGRAFT will commercialize a series of personalized tissue-engineered grafts on a global market. Current and future products will help millions of patients with today uncurable diseases, severely impacting quality of life and putting numerous patients out of work or into disability programs.

VERIGRAFT’s headquarters are located close to Gothenburg University and Sweden´s biggest university hospital in central Gothenburg. Here the company has state-of-the-art preclinical laboratories and offices. VERIGRAFT is led by a team of experienced scientists and entrepreneurs, and is backed by investors from Europe, Asia and the US. https://verigraft.com/.