Humacyte Announces the Appointments of Three Surgical and Cardiovascular Opinion Leaders to Advisory Roles
DURHAM, N.C., Dec. 31, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Humacyte, Inc. (Nasdaq: HUMA), a clinical-stage biotechnology platform company developing universally implantable bioengineered human tissue at
commercial scale, today announced the appointment of Surgical Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) Alan P. Kypson, M.D., FACS; Luigi Pascarella, M.D., FACS; and Todd E. Rasmussen, M.D., FACS, (Col, ret. USAF
MC), to new advisory positions. In these roles, the KOLs will lend their expertise and support to guide the education and clinical advancement efforts of the Human Acellular VesselTM
(HAV) and help identify opportunities to advance the Company's early stage complex tissue constructs pipeline and platform.
Humacyte’s HAV are engineered off-the-shelf replacement vessels currently being evaluated in advanced-stage clinical trials in vascular trauma, arteriovenous access for hemodialysis and peripheral arterial disease (PAD). The HAV are also being used to treat severe PAD patients under an investigator-sponsored IND #27864, filed with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) by Dr. Rasmussen, at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.
“Drs. Kypson, Pascarella and Rasmussen are luminaries in the fields of cardiac, vascular and trauma surgery, and we’ve had the pleasure of working with them in various capacities as we’ve developed the HAV,” said Laura Niklason, M.D., Ph.D., Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer of Humacyte. “We’re thrilled to now formalize their roles as foundational advisors to our clinical and surgical teams, as we prepare for our next phase of growth, anticipated commercialization of the HAV in its initial vascular indications, and planned expansion of the applications for our off-the-shelf regenerative medicine technology.”
Dr. Kypson is a cardiothoracic surgeon at the University of North Carolina Rex Hospital, in Raleigh, N.C. Previously, he served as Professor of Surgery at the Brody School of Medicine and Chief of the Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery at the East Carolina Heart Institute. Dr. Kypson has led the large animal preclinical development of Humacyte’s vessels in coronary artery bypass surgery for more than a decade, and has authored more than 100 publications, primarily in the field of cardiovascular surgery.