CTE, great move today and may well go more next week
Excerpt from a Dow Jones article
<<[CTE CEO] Szycher said CardioTech used a polymer process to develop the artificial vein, and researchers at the university created the electrostatic seeding method that incorporates endothilial cells into an artificial graft.
Szycher said the VascuLink press release CardioTech issued Thursday may have made investors aware of the little-known company.
"Investors are beginning to understand that we're not a typical biotech company with no revenues and something that may happen five years from now," he said. "We have some big things happening right now."
Szycher said he thinks the electrostatic process has the potential for FDA "fast-track" approval, since patients facing radical bypass surgery have few options.
The company plans to begin publicizing its findings outside of traditional medical publications and into more mainstream periodicals such as Popular Science, he said.
He sees artificial veins possibly replacing sophenous leg arteries in bypass surgery one day, although he acknowledges that is "down the road aways."
Independent medical-device analyst Gene Gargiulo said CardioTech and Thoratec Laboratories Corp. (THOR) are the only companies that have developed artificial-vein technology that would be acceptable to the FDA.
If CardioTech's technology can win FDA approval, he said, "you're going to cut the trauma and injury to the patient in half, and allow a lot of people that would die to live, especially in high-risk categories."
CardioTech and Thoratec Laboratories Corp. (THOR) are the only companies that have developed artificial-vein technology that would be acceptable to the FDA, Gargiulo said.
The U.S. market for such technology, if approved by the FDA, would be at least $1 billion, he said.
Gargiulo attributed CardioTech's stock rise to Wall Street's increasing awareness of the technology from the clinical advances made by both companies, the improving environment for "microcap" to small-cap medical-technology companies in 2000, and heightened awareness of the technology preceding the American College of Cardiology's March 12 convention in Anaheim, Calif.>> |
