Molly Sue,
Fancy you should suggest that. Ed Luck, one of the founders of MATX, was a co-founder of Collagen, which does just that, sells purified collagen for cosmetic applications.
Ed retired early, and was puttering around in his garage lab, as was his neighbor Dennis Brown (small world in the SF Bay Area), and they came up with the idea of adding chemotherapeutic drugs to the collagen vehicle, with a little epipenephrine as a vaso-constrictor to keep the chemo drug from spreading ... then injecting the stuff into various cancers. Hence MATX.
I'm not sure why they pushed the dermatologic applications early on ... hindsight proves it was a mistake, and I'm hoping there will be some good news on their Intradose head and neck cancer PIII trial that's ongoing.
It's hard to tell if these guys will be successful or not. Fortunate to have raised $67M in 1996 at $23 per share, they still have a lot of cash, and seem to have a good pipeline of interesting stuff behind Intradose, but it's a wait and see until the head and neck results come out. btw, my unqualified and subjective impression of the management is that they are not the very top of the field in biotech.
Peter |
