Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
in at the Hanson Institute in Adelaide in the early 2000s (Dean,
2011a, 2011b). Since then, Mesoblast has acquired US-based
Angioblast (also founded by Itescu) and secured a highly lucrative
deal with the pharmaceutical company Cephalon, moves that have
been credited to Itescu's diversity of talents and broad range of
experience (Dean, 2011a, 2011b).
Mesoblast was reportedly so successful financially in 2010-11
that its share price tripled on the Australian Securities Exchange
(Thomson, 2011). This has been largely attributed to the
groundbreaking deal made with Cephalon in late 2010 (Dean, 2011a,
2011b). More recently, the successful results of Phase II clinical trails
for Mesoblast's heart treatment product Revascor™, announced by
Itescu at a US conference in early June 2011, resulted in an
8.1 per cent increase in the share price the same day (Lower, 2011).
Applications for Phase IIb trials in the US and the EU are also in
process, with obvious commercial implications for Mesoblast should
the results prove the safety and efficacy of Revascor™ in larger
groups of people (Lower, 2011).
Mesoblast's commercial model is somewhat similar to that of a
pharmaceutical company, although its core products are
biotechnological. Aiming to develop off-the-shelf products that
could be utilized in a number of unrelated patients, Mesoblast is
exploiting one of the observable properties of mesenchymal stem
cells - that they provoke almost no immune response - to develop
products that operate in a similar fashion to traditional
pharmaceuticals. Unlike a pharmaceutical company though, where
traditionally one drug is developed for a single use, Mesoblast is
hopeful that the same technology might be used in a number of
clinical contexts. In the
Australian Life Scientist
profile cited earlier,
Itescu also indicated that one of Mesoblast's core commercial
strategies is to keep everything in-house, developing their own
products as far as they can themselves before potentially on-selling
(Dean, 2011b).
Developing a product all the way to market is generally quite
difficult to achieve for most biotechnology companies. As discussed
previously, a more standard commercial model in the biotechnology
sector would be to develop a product to a certain level and then sell
