Empowered Patient Podcast

Priyanka Dutta-Passecker is the CEO and Founder of Healiva, a Swiss start-up focused on innovative treatments for acute and chronic wounds. Healiva begins the process by cleaning the wound using an enzyme invented by Priyanka.  Depending on the severity of the wound, autologous or allogeneic cell therapy is used to make new skin to heal the wound. Priyanka explains, "So, to give a background for when we talk about personalized cell therapies and autologous cell therapy. We take a patient here, and from the patient, we make the patient's skin. That means that we're completely personalizing and making the skin of the patient. And this is given to extremely chronic non-healing wound patients like venous leg ulcer patients or diabetic foot ulcer patients. The skin gets integrated on their ulcer and closes the ulcer. That's one of our autologous cell therapy products called Epidex." "We do keep the primary cells when we take the hair follicle. As you may know, hair follicles are epithelial cells that we expand, a