Martin, interesting questions.Very very simplified:Inflammation...

Martin, interesting questions.

Very very simplified:

Inflammation is a natural process in the body. It's complex, still poorly understood, and lies at the heart of most pathological processes.

There's a reason that Robbins Pathology, one of the principal texts for doctors, devotes the first few chapters purely to the basics of inflammation.

Now, inflammation serves a purpose. It's extremely important for healing, for fighting infection, etc. And it can be broken down into acute vs. chronic - again, simplified.

Whole textbooks are devoted to the topic, so I'm not going to go into details. And many classes of drugs have been designed to modulate the inflammatory response (NSAIDS, steroids, immunomodulatory medications).

I guess WHO doesn't categorise inflammation itself as a disease because it isn't. It's a normal process. But as I said before, it underlies many disease states.

As for the next question, it touches on population health and primary prevention. It's important to determine your target populations when thinking about primary prevention, as well as the number needed to treat vs the number needed to harm (super simplified).

You would want to, for example, identify patient a patient population with risk factors for heart disease, stroke, PVD, etc (and we have many scoring systems for these things - looking at smoking, hypertension, cholesterol, age, diabetes, family history, etc).

Then you would want to do large trials in these populations using MSCs prophylactically and look at the outcomes. If they were successful, absolutely I could see the medical community adopting them into our arsenal.

Primary prevention is the most cost effective form of medicine. Show the medical community convincing results, and we are happy to do whatever it takes.

Needs the studies though. And we are a long way off.

I'm personally very skeptical (surprise surprise). But there's a reason I follow this company. I'm curious to see what it comes up with.