Article Excerpt:
TWST: Would you give us a brief historical sketch of the company and a picture of the things you are doing at the present time?Mr. McWilliams: Historically, the company was founded a little more than two years ago. It was originally called Pharma Frontiers. The company was started with the acquisition of the license from Argonne National Labs and the University of Chicago to produce stem cells from ordinary white blood cells. The private company was put into a public shell in the middle of 2004, and then in late 2004 the company acquired another private company called Opexa Pharmaceuticals that had a technology for multiple sclerosis that the company is currently developing. Subsequent to that, we raised approximately $35 million in two public offerings and acquired a technology for rheumatoid arthritis from the Chinese Academy of Sciences that is similar in concept to the one we are developing for multiple sclerosis. So, as we are currently constituted, the company is one that develops cell-based therapies. The common technical term for what we do is autologous cell-based therapies, in that we take cells from a specific individual, we bring them into our lab, we modify them, and we put them back into the same individual in the form of an injection. We have two broad-based cellular therapy platforms. One platform is our T-cell therapy platform whereby we identify a very specific T-cell that is responsible for an autoimmune disease. We do that from a sample from the patient. In the case of multiple sclerosis, that sample is the patient's blood. In the case of rheumatoid arthritis, it is the synovial fluid in the joint. After isolation of the cell, we expand it and modify it in our labs, and it is put back in the patient in the form an injection. The body will form an immune response against the modified cell, eliminating that cell, but also the active cells in the body, therefore stopping the disease progress. We are in Phase IIb studies in humans for multiple sclerosis and we plan to submit an IND to begin human trials in the first half of 2007 for rheumatoid arthritis. On the other side, we have an adult stem cell platform whereby we make stem cells from white blood cells and then we further differentiate those stem cells into pancreatic islet cells that produce insulin, and this is the primary program for our stem cell platform. The objective here is to replace pancreatic islet cells in Type I diabetics whose islet cells have been destroyed and they can no longer produce insulin. We can get the particular cells that we have in very large quantities, again, from a patient's blood. We do not think there are any rejection issues, and we anticipate that we will be able to initiate human trials in the first half of 2007 for this particular therapy.
Tickers included in this excerpt: OPXA
TWST Newsletter
For more information call (212) 952 7433. The Wall Street Transcript does not endorse any of the comments made by interviewees, and does not make stock recommendations.