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'Not going away': Mesoblast boss urges staying social distancing course
By Emma Koehn
Mesoblast chief Dr Silviu Itescu has warned Australians must not become complacent about the coronavirus threat even if a successful vaccine is discovered.
"I expect there will be a vaccine that works and is safe and comes online, and the numbers will come down dramatically. But this is a viral infection that will stay with us. It's not going away," he said.
Mesoblast major shareholder and CEO, Professor Silviu Itescu. Credit: Josh Robenstone
The chief of the regenerative medicine company also warned against relaxing any social distancing rules in the coming months, observing Australia's relatively low rate of infections was a result of the national shutdown.
"I would be very concerned about relaxing it, especially with the winter months coming," he said.
"Once the genie is out of the bottle, it’s hard to put it back in again."
On Thursday, Mesoblast told the Australian stock exchange it had secured an agreement with the US National Institute of Health to test its stem cell treatment on coronavirus patients and establish whether it will reduce the mortality of patients with severe respiratory illness caused by the virus.
The company's Remestemcel-L product will be evaluated in a trial of 240 patients with COVID-19 to test its effectiveness in treating acute respiratory distress syndrome. This can occur after the body's immune system has an excessive response to the virus, called a cytokine storm, which in turn results in damage to lung tissue.
The mortality rate of those with acute respiratory distress syndrome because of coronavirus is as high as 80 per cent.
Remestemcel-L has been developed for other inflammatory conditions and was successful in a Phase-3 trial in children to treat a condition called acute graft-versus-host disease, a condition in which the body's immune cells attack healthy cells after a bone marrow transplant.
The thinking is that those with acute respiratory distress syndrome have similarities in terms of the inflammation response seen in those with acute graft-versus-host disease.
Dr Itescu said the company will evaluate whether the treatment will reduce coronavirus mortality rates within a 28-day period.
It will take around three months to recruit patients for the trial but there should be some indications of the treatment's effectiveness as early as July, he said.
"It will then be to sit down with the FDA and talk about whether the data is strong enough. [If it is], what we need to plan for is how to scale up manufacturing."
The Mesoblast share price, which had already rocketed higheron news it was turning its focus to the coronavirus crisis, surged another 36 per cent to $2.50 on Thursday.
The company, which counts Anthony Pratt and Alex Waislitz among its investors, has been paving the way over recent weeks for the coronavirus trial.
On Monday, it received clearance from the US Food and Drug Administration to try Remestemcel-L with patients who had showed severe respiratory distress because of the virus.