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.

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.

The post Why did the Exopharm (ASX:EX1) share price surge 12% today? appeared first on The Motley Fool Australia.

At the time of writing, the Exopharm share price is down 15.7%, trading at 59 cents after hitting an intraday low of 55 cents.

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 also aims to commercialise exosomes as therapeutic agents. Exosomes are membraneous structures that allow cells to communicate and have the potential to restore dying cells.

Exopharm develops its products using mainly the LEAP (linked engineering and production) process, which involves total control over each step from engineering to manufacturing. 

Exopharm plunges on less-than-exciting results

In today's release, Exopharm advised its study on rodents found 3 key results. Firstly, if a knee joint is too damaged by osteoarthritis and there isn't enough cell tissue remaining to begin restoration, neither Plexaris nor Cevaris have any noticeable effect.

This appears to be the driving force behind the Exopharm share price decline today.

However, the company release also showed that the exosome treatments were "safe and well-tolerated following multiple (4 x weekly) dosing in rodents". 

Exopharm's report outlined that, in conjunction with prior preclinical work, results from this study directed product development to target "mild-to-moderate stage osteoarthritis". 

What Exopharm management said

Exopharm product evaluation head, Dr Angus Tester, said the study results were largely meaningless due to the rats studied.

Initially, we were surprised to see no beneficial effect of either Plexaris or Cevaris over control until we looked at the knee scans. We realised that in this testing, the knee joints were damaged beyond repair, with no obvious cartilage cells available to respond to the exosome treatment.

To accurately evaluate the exosome efficacy, we will need to have a model that has a less severe joint damage as the baseline to gather meaningful efficacy data.

Exopharm share price snapshot

Exopharm insists that the damage it inflicted to the rats' knee joints for the study would, in a human, require a knee reconstruction and therefore surpasses the viability of medical treatment. However, shareholders are clearly concerned that these results may limit the potential efficacy of its treatments.

The Exopharm share price has now fallen 26% this week and 24% this month, after huge gains, saw the Exopharm share price rise from 33 cents in December 2020 to 94 cents in February this year.

Overall, the Exopharm share price is up 271% this past year.

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