A great technology is one that not only fills important needs, but one that can be applied in more than one way to meet important needs. It gives the developer important flexibility in determining how to best address the marketplace, allowing them to avoid approaches that may be technically feasible but which involve low-margins or other problems. It can be the difference between a good idea that leads directly to financial success or a good idea that doesn’t get off the ground.
VistaGen Therapeutics, a California-based biotech company, has developed such a technology, providing them multiple options for monetization. Using their proprietary stem cell technology, VistaGen has created their Human Clinical Trials in a Test Tube bioassay platform, allowing researchers to test new drug candidates against actual heart and liver cells right in the lab, well before going to the expense of further development. The advantage is the early identification of potential heart or liver toxicity issues prior to spending enormous amounts of money taking a candidate through clinical trials or even all the way to market.
It’s a technology that gives VistaGen more than one approach to the market. The technology could be the basis for a proprietary screening service, potentially saving the pharmaceutical industry millions or even billions of dollars in misdirected investments. It could also represent a major purchase target, making VistaGen itself highly attractive as a possible takeover. But it’s a technology that also gives VistaGen the ability to take earlier drug candidates, previously shelved due to liver or heart toxicity issues, and rescue them, using their unique testing platform to modify the drugs, generating their own high-margin pipeline of safe drug candidates. Even moderate success at such a pipeline would be extraordinarily profitable.
For more information, visit www.vistagen.com
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