JangoBio sees hormone replacement therapy as key to ravages of aging

The degenerative brain disease associated with aging, Alzheimer’s, is a long-standing mystery in the medical world. With 5 million people living with Alzheimer’s disease in the United States alone, new approaches are being taken to discover the unknown causes of the condition.

Craig Atwood, founder of JangoBio, has spent the past 15 years researching the effects of aging-related hormone dysregulation as a cause for Alzheimer’s disease.

JangoBio has been utilizing Atwood’s research to develop a hormone replacement method to curb the effects and common diseases associated with hormone imbalance in both men and women.

“Our method has been to work backwards and determine that if we are able to offset hormone imbalance, we are therefore able to live longer,” said Atwood, an associate professor at the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health.

Traditional forms of hormone therapy, typically pharmaceuticals, cannot restore the regenerative mechanism within hormones the way JangoBio has been researching. Rather than prescribe medications for hormone replacement, Atwood and his team of scientists have engineered stem cells to repopulate the ovaries and testes with the hormones lost due to aging.

The company is composed of a management and scientific team with a lab in University Research Park in Madison, where it has begun in vivo experiments on rats.

JangoBio presented at this year’s Wisconsin Early Stage Symposium in Madison, where company leaders sought fundraising to support in vivo experiments of companion animals as well as to identify markets for the hormone replacement therapy.

The team at JangoBio is hoping that fundraising can aid in furthering the discussion with companies who would be interested in buying their stem cells for clients with hormone imbalance.

The market for hormone replacement therapies does not limit itself to humans — animals suffer from an equal level of hormone dysregulation that is a result of aging. The animal market presents an opportunity to enter the market and gain revenue to support the continuing studies on human therapy.

The company has been growing at a rapid pace since being established in 2014, and is projected to continue its growth in the upcoming years.

Alzheimer’s is not the only disease being targeted by JangoBio; they have also filed for patent coverage on diseases such as Type 2 diabetes, cancer, degenerative disk disease, and arthritis.

“There are no other companies working on hormone replacement from the inside-out. JangoBio is the next generation of hormone replacement therapy,” Atwood said.

By Jaime Beitel
Beitel is a student in the UW-Madison Department of Life Sciences Communication.