Congratulations Dr. Zaugg and team

Millions of patients worldwide suffer from intestinal failure, a condition where the gut is unable to absorb the necessary amount of food, fluids, and vitamins. These are predominantly critically ill patients or patients undergoing major surgeries, prolonged cancer therapies and infants born prematurely. In these cases, intravenous feeding (termed parenteral nutrition) is required to allow survival, maintain health, and, in the case of children, to support growth and development.

Currently available intravenous feeding therapies have many adverse effects such as liver inflammation, increased rate of infections and diabetes-like conditions, which reduce the quality of life and increase the likelihood of death.

Over the past five years Dr. Zaugg's team and collaborators have developed a novel fat emulsion (a liquid composed of fat and water) based on specific plant-derived oils termed Vegaven in their laboratories.  Vegaven has unique properties, namely strong anti-inflammatory effects combined with beneficial  effects on both sugar and fat metabolism in the whole body when given to mice. It also boosts the  immune system to efficiently counteract potentially dangerous infections. In this project, they will test  Vegaven in comparison to standard treatments in a pig model of intravenous feeding mimicking close to patient conditions and in tissue samples collected from the bowel of patients.

The proposed experiments will provide additional important scientific evidence necessary to initiate clinical studies in patients. It is expected that Vegaven will dramatically improve the safety and tolerability of intravenous nutrition in patients, potentially reducing the likelihood of death, improving  their quality of life, and reducing the health care costs associated with intravenous feeding.

This was the first commercialization grant the Department of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine has ever received.