Amgen’s VC wing has invested in Fortuna Fix to help move nautologous neural stem cells into the clinic. The $25 million series B sets regenerative medicine startup Fortuna up to move candidates against Parkinson’s disease and spinal cord injury to clinical trials next year.

Fortuna’s pipeline is built on the concept of direct cell reprogramming. Rather than start with induced pluripotent stem cells and tackle the challenge of converting them into neural cells, Fortuna’s process begins with fully differentiated cells taken from the patient. Fortuna then forces the expression of genes associated with being a neural stem cell before locking the cell, known as a drNPC, into this new position.

“There's a whole chromatin remodeling that takes place. And that chromatin remodeling, the epigenetic part of it, is done chemically. There's no genetic manipulation, no viral vectors, no animal components, no human embryos, no fetuses in the process,” Masha Le Gris, VP of corporate development at Fortuna, said.

The process uses a patient’s own cells. Initially, these will be taken from bone marrow but Fortuna thinks eventually it could use any harvestable cell, even those from the hair. The potential benefit of the approach is Fortuna should be able to administer its cells without immunosuppression.

Fortuna, under its previous name of Ophiuchus, has already tested its autologous neural stem cells in a clinical trial in Russia. Full details of the outcomes of the 30-patient, investigator-led spinal cord injury clinical trial are being kept under wraps pending their formal publication. But the fact spinal cord injury is one of two indications in which Fortuna is moving forward tells the broad story.

“We're moving forward with our clinical plans and therefore things were positive, the outcome was positive,” Le Gris said.