Osiris Therapeutics Creates Biosurgery Division
COLUMBIA, Md. -- Osiris Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ:OSIR) today announced the creation of a new Biosurgery Division focused on developing and marketing high-end biological products for use in surgical procedures. The company intends to build on the success of its first generation implantable product, Osteocel, which it launched in July of 2005. In its first three years, Osteocel generated over $40 million of revenue for the company before being sold to Nuvasive for up to $85 million in 2008.
"We believe we have the best-in-class team, infrastructure, and experience to attack unmet surgical problems with biologic solutions and significantly improve outcomes for patients," said Michelle LeRoux Williams, Ph.D., Chief Scientific Officer of Osiris Therapeutics, who led the successful development and launch of Osteocel. "Although we officially closed our Osteocel business unit in April, we retained a core team of physicians, scientists, regulatory, and manufacturing experts who are now focused on the commercialization of next generation biological constructs. With 18 years of experience in cell therapy, Osiris is uniquely positioned to advance surgical aspects of regenerative medicine."
Substantially advancing bone repair is a major focus of this new division. Given the strong acceptance of Osteocel in the marketplace, the Biosurgery team will aggressively pursue introducing a new, generationally superior line of bone repair and regeneration products, termed XC. These products will utilize more advanced manufacturing techniques to produce highly purified, culture-expanded stem cells. The goal of the XC project is to create a line of osteogenic products that can be used to treat a variety of orthopedic conditions.
About Osiris Therapeutics
Osiris Therapeutics, Inc. is the leading stem cell therapeutic company focused on developing products to treat serious medical conditions in the inflammatory, orthopedic and cardiovascular areas. The Company's pipeline of internally developed biologic drug candidates under evaluation includes Prochymal for inflammatory, autoimmune, and cardiovascular indications, as well as Chondrogen for arthritis in the knee. Osiris is a fully integrated company, with capabilities in research, development, manufacturing, and distribution of stem cell products. Osiris has developed an extensive intellectual property portfolio to protect the company's technology including 49 U.S. patents each having one or more foreign counterparts. Osiris, Prochymal and Chondrogen are registered trademarks of Osiris Therapeutics, Inc. More information can be found on the company's website, www.Osiris.com. (OSIR-G)
In November 2008, Osiris and Genzyme announced a strategic alliance for the development and commercialization of Prochymal and Chondrogen. Under the terms of the agreement, Osiris retains commercialization rights to Prochymal and Chondrogen in the United States and Canada, with Genzyme having these rights in all other countries.
Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements include statements about our expectations, beliefs, plans, objectives, intentions, assumptions and other statements that are not historical facts. Words or phrases such as "anticipate," "believe," "continue," "ongoing," "estimate," "expect," "intend," "may," "plan," "potential," "predict," "project" or similar words or phrases, or the negatives of those words or phrases, may identify forward-looking statements, but the absence of these words does not necessarily mean that a statement is not forward-looking. Examples of forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements regarding the following: our product development efforts; our clinical trials and anticipated regulatory requirements and the ability to successfully navigate these requirements; the success of our product candidates in development; status of the regulatory process for our biologic drug candidates; implementation of our corporate strategy; our financial performance; our product research and development activities and projected expenditures, including our anticipated timeline and clinical strategy for Prochymal, Chondrogen and our other MSC and biologic drug candidates; our cash needs; patents and proprietary rights; the safety and ability of our potential products to treat disease and the results of our scientific research; our plans for sales and marketing; our plans regarding our facilities; types of regulatory frameworks we expect will be applicable to our potential products; and results of our scientific research. Forward-looking statements are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties and are based on potentially inaccurate assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expected or implied by the forward-looking statements. Risks and uncertainties related to the sale of our Osteocel assets and related transactions include typical business transactional risks, the risk of changing relationships with customers, suppliers or employees; and the risk that we may not be able to fully perform or generate or receive milestone payments. Risks and uncertainties related to our Collaboration Agreement with Genzyme for the development and commercialization of Prochymal and Chondrogen include, among others: typical business transactional risks; risks related to product development and clinical trial design, performance and completion; uncertainty of the success of Prochymal and Chondrogen in clinical trials and their ability to treat disease; Genzyme's early termination and opt-out rights; the ability of Osiris and Genzyme to successfully navigate regulatory requirements and to manufacture and commercialize products; and the uncertainty as to our ability to successfully perform under the collaborative arrangement and earn milestone and royalty payments thereunder. Our actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in forward-looking statements for many reasons, including the factors described in the section entitled "Risk Factors" in our Annual Report on Form 10-K and other Periodic Reports filed on Form 10-Q, with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. Accordingly, you should not unduly rely on these forward-looking statements. We undertake no obligation to publicly revise any forward-looking statement to reflect circumstances or events after the date of this press release or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events.