It Took 20 Years, But Now There’s New Hope for Patients with Severe Liver Disease

Why Lightspeed is Funding Satellite Bio’s Scalable Solution

One of the first surgeries Sangeeta Bhatia observed in medical school was a liver transplant. She was already enamored with the liver and all 500 of its vital functions in the human body. She loved that the liver is the only organ that can regenerate.

Unfortunately, that patient didn’t survive the procedure.

Bhatia knew then the liver would be her future. She was determined to find a safer, scalable alternative to transplants, a solution that would help not only those on the transplant list but also the 500 million people worldwide suffering from liver disease. And she was convinced that the cellular building blocks of the liver, the hepatocytes, held the answers.

Now, after over 20 years of research, Bhatia is ready to unveil her findings with her collaborator, Chris Chen. The pair co-founded Satellite Bio, which is de-stealthing today. The company, led by Dave Lennon, has over $110 million in funding, which Lightspeed co-led with aMoon Velocity and Polaris. I’m excited to introduce you to the company and its journey to develop Tissue Therapeutics to help patients suffering from liver disease — and other organ-related diseases in the future.

OUR INVESTMENT IN SATELLITE BIO

Chronic liver disease has historically been underappreciated and underfunded, despite a huge unmet need. When other organs are unhealthy, like the heart, doctors have a variety of interventions, like stents and bypass machines. For the liver, there is no option besides a transplant — and as is, the broader organ transplant ecosystem is not working at the scale we need for modern medicine because of its one-to-one, analog solution.

We need a solution for severe liver disease that halts progression before the point of transplantation, one that engineers biology to create a scalable solution — and that’s what drew me to Satellite Bio. The company’s platform can create therapeutics at scale for organ-related diseases, and its promise of serving many different groups of patients, not just one, resonated with my value of placing patient impact first.

Bhatia and I first connected when we both worked with Robert Langer at MIT, and I’ve been following her career over the decades. When she told me that Satellite’s Tissue Therapeutics platform has the potential to take one set of liver cells and turn it into treatments for many patients, I knew Lightspeed needed to partner with Satellite on its mission.

BREAKTHROUGHS IN BIOENGINEERING

Bhatia and Chen met on the first day of graduate school. He was focused on blood vessels, and she was researching the liver. It would be a decade later when they realized that by combining their research, they could save countless lives.

Bhatia had always thought a therapeutic solution to liver disease lay within hepatocytes, but infusing patients with isolated cells doesn’t work because 90% of cells die on their way to the liver.

In graduate school, Bhatia learned that to keep hepatocytes alive and happy, they need to be nestled together in a cube-shaped structure. Once she became a professor at UCSD, Bhatia cracked the problem of how to assemble hepatocytes in a 3D structure suitable for implantation. Using microfabrication tools — the same used to build computer chips — she precisely assembled the cells next to each other.

As a professor at Johns Hopkins, Chen was also using microfabrication tools, but to grow blood vessels. The final breakthrough in the series of discoveries came when he realized the missing ingredient to Bhatia’s hepatocyte implants was vascularization.

By growing blood vessels into the matrix of the hepatocyte implant, the cells could be wired into the body directly to receive the nutrients they need to thrive — meaning they can be implanted anywhere in the body to improve liver function, not only into the organ itself.

And thus the idea of organ “satellites” was born — a regenerative solution to organ disease that can turn a donated organ into many Tissue Therapeutics with a minimally invasive procedure.

Because of Bhatia’s expertise, Satellite is focusing first on the liver, but its Satellite Adaptive Tissue (SAT) platform is also being applied to other organs. The versatility of Satellite’s platform is another aspect that drew me to invest in the company.

Satellite Bio can help a wide range of patients with organ disease, and can also provide a stopgap treatment for those waiting for a transplant. Even if they still require a new organ down the line, we can give patients hope and improve their quality of life. This ambitious goal is what’s most important to Lightspeed, and we’re excited to partner with the Satellite team.