April 4, 2017 11:33am
Stock jumped +$0.56 or +6.26% to $9.50 by mid-day
Boston Children’s Hospital, the pediatric teaching hospital of Harvard University, and MESO announced that the FDA has cleared the commencement of a 24-patient trial combining Mesoblast's proprietary allogeneic mesenchymal precursor cells (MPCs) with corrective heart surgery in children under the age of 5 with hypoplastic left heart syndrome (HLHS).
The trial is sponsored and funded by the Boston Children’s Hospital with support from Bulens and Capozzi Foundation and the Ethan Lindberg Foundation.
The normal heart contains left and right ventricles. Children with HLHS have a functioning right ventricle, but have a small left ventricle that is incapable of supporting the systemic circulation. If left untreated, the HLHS is uniformly fatal. Current treatment – called “single – ventricle palliation” – uses the right ventricle to support the entire circulation through a series of surgeries. However, the right ventricle eventually tires out, leading to nearly 50% mortality by adolescence. This is why Dr. Emani and his colleagues have been developing strategies to rehabilitate the left ventricle and perform biventricular conversion.
In the randomized controlled trial, Mesoblast’s product candidate MPC-150-IM will be injected into the left ventricle of children with HLHS during surgical recruitment procedures of the small ventricle with the intent of improving ventricular mass and function leading to higher likelihood of biventricular conversion.
The Bottom Line: Combining Boston Children Hospital’s expertise to treat hypoplastic heart syndrome with the regenerative potential of MPC-150-IM is “to develop a highly innovative treatment for this complex congenital condition as well as other serious and life-threatening cardiac diseases in children.”
Love the high, but the trading “mice” will be attracted to the upside … SELL some into the high.
