The Exopharm Ltd (ASX: EX1) share price rocketed today after the company announced positive clinical trial results for its regenerative medical product, Plexaris.
At market close, the Exopharm share price is up by 12.93% today to 65 cents per share.
Exopharm is a biopharmaceutical company focused on developing regenerative medicine. It's currently investigating the therapeutic potential of two products, Plexaris and Cevaris, in treating osteoarthritis.
The company was undergoing clinical trials to see if the medicine can restore arthritic cell tissue in rats. These clinical trials showed that the drugs had no adverse affects and were safe to trial on humans, however they also showed that drugs' efficacy was limited to milder cases, which led to a sharp drop in the Exopharm share price last week.
Image source: Getty Images
Exopharm moves to human trials with safe results
The Exopharm share price has recovered some of last week's losses after the company reported that its human trials with 11 participants showed no adverse effects so far. The study resulted in no untoward or unexpected safety events reported, with all 11 enrolled participants remaining healthy throughout and after their 30-day follow-up period.
Moreover, all induced wounds successfully healed without skin defects, abnormal scarring or abnormal cosmetic appearance. However, due to the small numbers involved in the study there are no significant efficacy signals.
What Exopharm management said
Exopharm founder Ian Dixon was nonetheless very bullish about the results, especially about the scalability of the company's linked engineering and production (LEAP) process, which involves total control over each step from engineering to manufacturing.
These results confirm Exopharm as a leader in extracellular (EV) medicine manufacture and further validate our LEAP manufacturing technology. 40 clinical-grade doses of Plexaris were made within eight hours by two staff. If the study had been 100 times larger, it still would have taken the same amount of time and labour, only larger equipment.
This is what we mean when we say LEAP is the only fully scalable process for exosome purification that has been developed. This manufacturing capability is fully applicable to our engineered EV program, as this manufacturing process and the safety of product coming out of it is applicable to all EV medicines processed with LEAP.
Exopharm share price snapshot
Despite these gains, the Exopharm share price has still fallen 9% this month. The Exopharm share price has entered a corrective period, after it rose from 33 cents in December 2020 to 94 cents in February this year.
Overall, the Exopharm share price is up 247% this past year.
