PolarityTE is focused on transforming the lives of patients by discovering, designing, and developing a range of regenerative tissue products that mirror the natural healing processes in the human body. Our technology harnesses a patient’s own cells and redeploys them to allow the body to regenerate itself on the site of the defect.
Built into human DNA is an amazing ability for the body to heal itself. But what happens when our own healing process takes too long, or when there’s a need to replace tissue that is too badly damaged or missing entirely? That’s where PolarityTE has found the paradigm shift in disruptive biotechnology that will change the practice of medicine.
At PolarityTE, our revolutionary platform is being developed to induce cell and tissue polarity, creating uniquely functional tissue to mirror natural development in the human body. Our launch product, SkinTE, does this by taking a small sample of healthy skin from the patient and turning it into a paste that is reapplied to acute, traumatic, and chronic wounds, including burns and diabetic foot ulcers. By allowing the cells to grow directly on the injured area, those cells can communicate with surrounding tissue, which help it to grow to full-thickness, fullyfunctioning skin with sweat glands and hair.
SkinTE’s approach is an alternative to the traditional skin graft treatment, which often has complications that leaves patients in the hospital for months and creates painful scars that limit mobility. The product has also been successful in recent pilot clinical studies to treat patients with diabetic foot ulcers.
In the three years since inception, we have grown from two (2) to more than 150 employees, from 4,000 to more than 200,000 square feet, taken a product from bench to bedside, registered a second product with the FDA, and progressed a product pipeline. Our facilities include roughly 170,000 square feet of R&D and manufacturing space in Salt Lake City and Logan, as well as new corporate headquarters near the Salt Lake International Center.
Born from a desire by doctors to help patients who have lost hope, PolarityTE was founded by physicians who left their residencies at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine to start the company. Edward Swanson, MD, PolarityTE’s Co-founder and Chief Translational Medicine Officer, says of his decision to walk away from his clinical physician career path, “It became clear that as a physician, PolarityTE was a place I could bring solutions now, not in decades, to patients who have been told there are no other treatment options too many times.”
Choosing Utah was a business decision that convinced PolarityTE executives to leave coastal biotech breeding grounds to launch in Utah. The state’s location and infrastructure facilitate distribution, which is key to our business model that requires quick access to customers across the country. Our founders recognized a growing and thriving life sciences industry already in place in Utah, and hoped to capitalize on the strong Utah economy, affordable cost of doing business, enviable quality of life, and homegrown talent.
PolarityTE recognizes that deep technology companies that are founded on scientific discovery and meaningful engineering innovation take time, and we are in it for the long haul. This means cultivating people along with the work by fostering a corporate culture where employees can build careers and compete at a global scale – while also building successful and fulfilling lives where families can thrive.
But before all else, our physician-founded company aims to put the patient first by building great products and getting them to patients as quickly as possible.
