Every day for Erin Crowley feels like sci-fi. “We are essentially an age zero bio bank,” she says, “looking to invest in the future of people’s health with our exosome currency.” As comanaging partner of the Crowley Center for Regenerative Biotherapeutics, she describes the stem cells, grown from umbilical cords, as a skeleton key that carries the ingredients and messages to reprogram damaged cells.
In high school, Crowley was obsessed with the Fast and the Furious movies. She wanted to go to college to design cars but ultimately enrolled as an engineering student when she was recruited to play soccer. An injury took a toll on her soccer career, grades, and mental health. Home for the summer, she took a class at RIT and met Dr. Alan Nye, assistant dean of engineering and chair advisor for a formula racing team.
“It was loaded with labs and racing technology,” Crowley recalls. “I came home that day and told my parents, I’m switching to RIT.” After college, Crowley took a job with Toyota, starting in Vancouver. She worked as a sustainability engineer in Alabama and a quality engineer in San Antonio.
Crowley spent her twenties outdoors and adventuring, living in ten cities in ten years. But when her grandfather died in 2012, she felt homesick for the first time and returned to Rochester. “He was a chemist, the person I talked to about everything engineering and science.”
In 2018, Crowley’s father, Michael, acquired the license for the Sanatela Matrix. Bioengineered from 100 percent decellularized Wharton’s jelly (from the inside of an umbilical cord), the matrix is a natural in vitro cell culturing system and single treatment option platform that enables doctors to screen and test a full range of therapies to create a precision cancer treatment plan for each patient. The drug screening that is currently performed inside a patient’s body could now be done in the lab.
Michael Crowley immediately brought his daughter Erin in to open all the manufacturing. “I was always hoping that I could work with him someday.” Crowley remembers telling her kindergarten class that her dad was an entrepreneur back when no one knew what that was.
In March 2020, in Wuhan, China, Dr. Dongcheng Wu gave critically ill COVID-19 patients a Wharton’s Jelly stem cell IV. Within a few days, all of the participants made a full recovery, and the study has since been replicated in the United States. Crowley hired the best bone marrow transplant stem cell growers from the University of Rochester and launched a lab in Fairport with a team of industrial and biomedical engineers.
When a healthy baby is born, there are about half a million stem cells left over in the cord, but 100 million stem cells are needed for one treatment. Crowley’s team plates them, feeds them, and grows them in the lab. “We started counting and found out we had one thousand trillion exosomes, which is over 200,000 treatments. With one umbilical cord, you could treat 200,000 people. It was just a total surprise. My dad said, ‘You’re in the exosome business now.’”
The goal was to fight the COVID-19 virus, and Crowley’s team worked tirelessly to bring the cost down as one treatment of IV stem cells cost roughly $100,000. Ultimately, the U.S. decided to go with the vaccination, and the trials were halted, leaving Crowley with the biggest yield supply of exosomes that exist in manufacturing.
She started selling the exosomes to regenerative medicine clinics internationally and then started working with doctors under the Right to Try law and the 21st Century Cures Act. These laws allow patients suffering from life-threatening diseases to use these experimental biologic products.
Existing medicine targets cancer cells, but the cancer stem cells are more elusive. The matrix takes someone’s leukemia blood sample, spins it down to the cancer, and starts growing their cancer stem cells in a petri dish, making them strong out of the body, which allows doctors to determine the best dose and treatment.
“With targeted therapy,” says Crowley, “we could reduce the number of deaths related to chemotherapy as well as start to go after the cancer stem cell.” Crowley is excited about the clinical trials starting in Ireland’s Galway University, using the University of Rochester technology.
Crowley was asked to launch a skincare brand using her exosomes. She conducted a clinical study that including the editors of Vogue and the New York Cut. It yielded incredible results, and Resiliélle was launched. The name is a combination of the Latin word for resilient and Crowley’s mother, Ellen. “Our researchers said, ‘You want us to put out this product for wrinkles?’” Crowley recalls. “Yeah, absolutely wrinkles. That’s gonna pay for a lot of other things!”
As CEO of Resiliélle Cosmetics, Crowley has grown a huge national sales team and has distributors in Pakistan, Lebanon, Kuwait, Qatar, Turkey, Canada, and Azerbaijan. Already popular in Paris, Dubai, Miami, and Beverly Hills, you can find Crowley’s exosomes locally in hair restoration treatments at Vitalize Medical & Aesthetics on Monroe Avenue. Her products are available for purchase as well, to use at home topically for skin and hair.
Compared to treating life-threatening diseases, Crowley wasn’t sure if the world of aesthetics would be fulfilling. But hearing women tell her they now feel comfortable in their skin is a big reward. She says, “So much of these aesthetics isn’t about vanity for the sake of vanity; it’s a real sense of your identity.”
A Harvard report recently revealed that many companies are producing and selling inactive exosomes. Crowley won’t let that destroy what her team has built, saying “Consumers deserve to understand what’s in their product, and if it’s bioactive. They’re spending up to $2,000, and there’s nothing in them.” She has created an oversight bureau and travels the world speaking out against fraud in the industry.
Mother to two young children, Crowley sees a bright future ahead. She predicts we will have access to a daily preventative nasal spray and that these nonaddictive, nontoxic exosomes will also replace opioids for pain management and inflammation.
Crowley donates her product to countries like Lebanon, where children have extensive burns and wounds from air strikes. Locally, she is looking to collaborate with more partners and looks forward to using the surplus of exosomes to fund medical trials and give back to the community. She hopes doctors will come to her if they have a problem they’ve never been able to solve.
Just as the internet changed life as we know it, Crowley believes that biologics are going to change the entire world in terms of how medicine is practiced. She says, “I think it’s pretty awesome to be living in an era where biologic medicine is going to totally change the future of how we can let our bodies repair themselves like never before.”
This article originally appeared in the July/August 2025 issue of (585).
Views: 0
