2012 Stem Cell Standouts And The Outlook For 2013 Feb 28 2013, 14:15 The year ahead looks to be promising for the emerging stem cell therapy companies. With an exciting year behind it with multiple promising press releases, positive data presented and even the first official regulatory approval for marketing, I believe the sector has proven itself to be investment worthy with not quite as much risk or speculation as in the past, although there is much work yet to be done in trials. There are three standout companies that I believe have promising therapies that deserve additional research for their potential. Below are summaries of promising companies that had a great year behind them. In each section, I have expressed my own opinion as to the company's investment potential, but I recommend readers doing additional research to confirm or deny my own personal conclusions. NeoStem (NBS) announced the extension of intellectual property protection for its lead product candidate, AMR-001, with the issue of U.S. patent number 8,343,485 with the title of "Compositions and methods of Vascular Injury Repair." The company advises that this is the third U.S. patent for AMR-001 and protects "further expansion of its CD34+ chemotactic stem cell product composition claim as well as method of sourcing and administration of cells claims." AMR-001 is being developed at Amorcyte, LLC, which was acquired by NeoStem in October 2011. Amorcyte is working on a cell therapy for cardiovascular disease treatment and has begun enrolling patients in a Phase 2 trial to investigate the efficacy of the treatment in preserving heart function after a heart attack has occurred. The company's website states that roughly 800,000 myocardial infarction events occur in the United States annually and, despite all the progress in medicine, around 20% or 160,000 patients have an ST-Elevation MI (STEMI) resulting in a reduced Left Ventricular Ejection Fraction (LVEF) of less than 50%. It goes on to explain that "their MI was big enough and their heart so damaged that the remaining heart muscle could not compensate for the damaged heart tissues and, over time, the hearts starts to fail. These patients are at significant risk of downstream adverse events including congestive heart failure, re-current MI, significant arrhythmias, premature death or acute coronary syndrome." This is the target market for AMR-001, and it presents a market opportunity in excess of $1.2 billion annually for the treatment.
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