The Staggering Impacts of Degenerative Disc Disease and What DiscGenics Is Doing About It

Millions of people globally suffer from chronic degenerative disc disease (DDD) yearly. These people have progressive aches and pains that don't go away and are not responsive to conservative care, which includes physical therapy, over-the-counter medications, and chiropractic care. They often face a costly and potentially ineffective path toward pain relief. DiscGenics is working towards creating a more effective and cost-effective treatment pathway. 

The Challenges the DDD Patient Population Faces

Pain and Lower Quality of Life

A diagnosis of DDD is typically confirmed via MRI or X-ray, showing that the patient has a dark or degenerating disc. This means the intervertebral disc has started to break down. The effects of this can be very painful. 

You can imagine it like a shock absorber or a strut in a vehicle. When you have good suspension on your vehicle, your vehicle is stable and you have a lot of control while driving. When the shocks or struts break down, your vehicle becomes unstable and bounces, making it difficult to control. 

Something similar happens to your spine. When a degenerating disc starts to break down, the cells die off, and the disc fails to maintain the hydration, or the cushion necessary for stabilization. The disc may bulge and start to contract, which means the patient will start losing disc height. The bulging of the disc may push on the adjacent nerve roots that come out of the spinal canal, causing pain. They'll sometimes cause radiculopathy, where pain will radiate down your legs. 

Once this degeneration occurs, it doesn't self-repair and continues to degenerate. It can be in the form of a herniated disc where some of the weakness that develops in the annulus of the disc will cause a bulge that will happen anteriorly of that disc tissue, pushing on the nerve roots. 

Costly and Ineffective Traditional Treatments

In certain cases where a patient’s disease has progressed and conservative care has been exhausted, surgery is warranted. Traditional DDD surgeries include discectomy procedures and spinal fusion. These tend to be very expensive and are often ineffective. 

With a discectomy procedure, the bulging disc tissue is surgically removed in a minimally invasive way, creating a disc defect.

Spinal fusion procedures are open, invasive surgical procedures where the diseased disc is removed. A spacer called a cage is typically implanted and supplemented with screws and rods or plates with a bone graft substitute to fuse two or more vertebrae together. 

These types of fusions lock up the spine. This extra rigidity can cause wear and tear on the levels above and below the fusion, leading to adjacent-level disease.

The outcomes of spinal fusion procedures are no better than 50%. So many times, a patient can have the fusion procedure, but they still have other sources of pain. 

What DiscGenics is Doing to Help DDD Sufferers 

DiscGenics’s injectable discogenic progenitor cell therapy (IDCT or rebonuputemcel) for DDD, is being investigated in clinical trials as a potential solution for the early to moderate stages of chronic DDD. IDCT is an early intervention therapy designed to greatly reduce the time and money spent on the traditional conservative treatments that oftentimes don't work.

With IDCT, the patient receives an injection in a treatment room under a c-arm to place the needle. It takes an hour at maximum. Our initial clinical study has shown that IDCT can be durable for up to two years and reduce the symptoms of pain and improve function and quality of life. 

The beauty of IDCT is that it's very cost-effective in relation to all the other treatment options and can actually remove a significant amount of cost from the system. As we're able to provide relief to our patients, we also hope to offer restorative improvement that can either significantly delay the requirement for further surgery or even prevent the need for surgery or pain medications, such as opioids.

Ultimately our mission, as we translate into our pivotal trial and then toward commercialization, is to be able to treat the millions of patients suffering from DDD. Millions of patients globally in the mild and moderate DDD space will have an affordable and more time-efficient option for improving their function and quality of life.