Cell Therapy News/Articles, page-8334

Stocksa this is what id like to comment on from SI or others


At that point Cynata had commenced research into its own ARDS treatment. But did Mesoblast's failure unnerve Cynata CEO Ross Macdonald? Not a chance."I'm more confident that our trial will be successful where theirs was a failure," Macdonald said."If you use a process like we have developed - we don't rely on multiple different [stem cell] donations. You start with exactly the same material every time."To explain, Macdonald used the analogy of a local café; you normally expect a coffee from one café to taste more or less exactly the same every time you go there - the same beans are used every time.Whereas Macdonald said Mesoblast's process is like going to the same café every day, but each visit they use different beans from a different supplier which leads to inconsistency in taste and flavour. Cynata's approach with its MSCs is in line with the first example - what you get the first time from them will be replicated in each and every dose of the drug - while MSB's is like the latter."Yes, you still got the coffee, but the experience of the taste is totally different than it was yesterday," he said."The FDA said to Mesoblast, well you've got a manufacturing problem that is reliant upon multiple donors prepared to donate bone marrow and that is flawed."So with that in mind it's perhaps not surprising that they had a pretty disappointing result in the clinical trials."Additionally, Macdonald said the initial investor reactions to MSB's early COVID-19 trail results were overblown."The initial data from their trial that got everybody excited was, in my view, quite flawed, because they said "look at how many patients are dying in intensive care units with COVID compared the patients that we treated," he said."But the reality of the situation was quite different. The control group at that time - the death rate was way, way higher than you would typically see for ARDS, whether its COVID or anything else. And it was simply because of the chaos that existed in intensive care units in New York in the first wave."So we think that the initial enthusiasm was perhaps a little misguided."