A liver disease that kills faster than most cancers has few options beyond a transplant. A new partnership aims to change where care happens.
End-stage liver disease doesn’t leave much room for error. More than 500,000 Americans currently live with it, a number projected to climb to 600,000 by 2040, and the numbers tell a grim story once the disease reaches its later stages. After a patient’s first serious decompensation event, an episode where the liver’s function collapses further, the disease progresses rapidly: within two years, 37% of patients die, and only 5% receive a liver transplant. Median survival drops from about two years after that first crisis to just nine months after a second one.
Transplantation remains the only treatment that actually changes the disease’s course, but it’s wildly out of reach for most patients, limited by donor scarcity, the small number of transplant centers and the sheer difficulty of surgery for people who are often too sick to travel far from home. That leaves most decompensated patients managed wherever they happen to live, in community care settings without access to cutting-edge cell therapy.
Rewiring the immune system’s repair crew
Resolution Therapeutics, an Edinburgh and London-based biotech spun out of the University of Edinburgh, is developing a different kind of intervention. Its lead candidate, RTX001, belongs to a therapy class the company calls Regenerative Macrophage Therapy [1].
Macrophages are immune cells that normally serve two roles: cleaning up damaged tissue through inflammation, and later helping that same tissue heal and regenerate. Resolution’s approach essentially reprograms macrophages to lean harder into their repair function, restarting the body’s own regenerative machinery inside a scarred, failing liver rather than introducing an outside drug to compensate for what’s been lost.
Early-phase studies of RTX001 haven’t turned up significant safety concerns, and the treatment doesn’t require the kind of intensive preconditioning, such as chemotherapy-like drugs to prepare the body or extended hospital monitoring that make many cell therapies impractical outside major medical centers. It’s delivered through a repeat-dose regimen via a standard IV line, a detail that matters enormously for a patient population too sick to easily travel.
Bringing the treatment to where patients already are
That’s the problem this week’s announcement is aimed at solving. Resolution has partnered with the Blood Centers of America (BCA), the largest blood supply network in the country, to build out the infrastructure needed to deliver RTX001 in community settings rather than requiring patients to funnel through a handful of specialized transplant centers.
BCA’s network spans more than 400 apheresis machines across over 100 locations in 43 states, along with clean-room and cryopreservation capacity built to handle the collection, processing, and storage that advanced cell therapies require.
“RTX001 is intentionally designed and manufactured to address the historical limitations impacting cell therapy adoption in a community-based setting,” said Amir Hefni, CEO of Resolution Therapeutics. “Our partnership with the Blood Centers of America, Inc. will ensure patients can receive treatment with the doctor they trust, close to home.”
Bill Block, CEO of Blood Centers of America, framed the partnership around BCA’s existing reach.
“Our partnership with Resolution Therapeutics will rely on the national patient apheresis footprint of our members, as well as their product handling and storage capabilities, to support participating healthcare organizations to treat end-stage liver disease with their highly innovative cell therapy in regions where such care might not otherwise be available,” he said.
Why access is the real longevity story here
It’s tempting to read this as a straightforward supply-chain announcement, plumbing for a future drug rather than a scientific breakthrough. However, access is exactly the piece that determines whether a promising therapy actually extends healthy years for real patients or stays confined to a small population near major academic hospitals. A treatment that could meaningfully improve transplant-free survival means little if it only reaches people who happen to live near Boston or Edinburgh.
Resolution plans to launch its pivotal US trial for RTX001 in 2027, following a pre-IND meeting with the FDA, with the company continuing to finalize trial design and site selection in the meantime.
Beyond liver disease, Resolution is also exploring its macrophage-reprogramming platform in other fibrotic conditions, including lung fibrosis, and developing an in vivo version of the therapy that could someday skip the cell-collection process entirely.
For now, though, the more immediate contribution may be the least glamorous one: making sure that when a regenerative therapy does clear the finish line, the infrastructure already exists to get it to the patients who need it most, wherever they live.
