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The shares of ReNeuron, a third-party owned by experienced investor Neil Woodford specializing in stem cell treatments for the treatment of eye diseases and stroke, increased by more than 30% on Tuesday. after the announcement of the signing of a license agreement for the development of its products and marketed in China.
Fosun Pharma, a Chinese Life Sciences Company, Licensing the Rights of Two Cell Therapy Programs Under a Potential GBP 80 Million Contract for British Biotechnology plus Royalty Payments .
Yifang Wu, president of Fosun Pharma, said ReNeuron's licensed products and stem cell expertise would "create many strategic synergies with our current business, meeting the huge unmet needs of the Chinese market."
One of the two ReNeuron programs licensed from Fosun Pharma is for the treatment of retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic eye defect that affects approximately 100,000 people in the United States alone.
Olav Hellebo, CEO of ReNeuron, said that in clinical studies, patients could read three additional lines, 15 letters, on an eye test card after treatment with the company's stem cells. an improvement considered "very significant". . He suggested that the treatment could create new photoreceptors in the eyes, a response never seen before, he said.
The US Food and Drug Administration is currently accelerating approval of treatment due to the lack of effective treatment for RA.
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ReNeuron is also conducting trials on a treatment for people who have lost movement after a stroke, a therapy that involves an injection of neurological stem cells.
While the broader field of gene and cell therapy has grown rapidly in recent years, few companies are already using pure stem cell therapy.
Hellebo said this partly reflected the typical development cycle of the pharmaceutical sector. "When stem cells arrived 10 or 20 years ago, [they were] completely overhyped, so everyone lost interest because it turned out to be really difficult. . . But now it comes back because we understand how to get good quality, how to make good, and we start getting good quality data. "
The agreement reached in China offered access to "a very large market and it is a market we could never tackle alone," he said.
Fosun Pharma will fully fund the development of ReNeuron's eye disease and stroke cell treatment programs in China, including clinical development and commercialization. He also obtained the right to manufacture the licensed products in China.
ReNeuron shares closed the day at £ 221.75.
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