GERMANTOWN, Md., March 30, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Orgenesis Inc. (NASDAQ: ORGS), a pioneering, global biotech company committed to lowering costs, accelerating commercialization, and transforming the delivery of cell and gene therapies (CGTs), provides the following letter to its shareholders from CEO Vered Caplan:
“To our valued shareholders,
First, I’d like to share my sincere sympathies to those individuals and families affected by the COVID-19 virus. The entire biotech and pharma industries have mobilized around the common mission of finding potential COVID-19 cures and therapies. I am eternally grateful to all of our employees who are working tirelessly towards this mission. We have received approval from the regulators to continue working in our research and development labs during the pandemic, and we are leveraging all our knowledge and expertise in the field of cell and gene therapy, including anti-viral technologies relevant to COVID-19. We look forward to providing further updates on this front in the very near future.
In more general Orgenesis news, since the beginning of 2020, we have dramatically transformed the company. This past February, we completed the sale of Masthercell, which generated approximately $127 million in net proceeds to Orgenesis. This sale was an important step in our strategy to leverage our unique capabilities that directly address the key challenges facing the cell and gene therapy (CGT) industry. Despite the fact that CGT therapies have the potential to solve some of the most challenging diseases in the world, many of these therapies cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per patient, per year. In order to address this barrier to broader market adoption of CGTs, we recently unveiled our CGT Biotech Platform, whose goal is to decentralize the CGT supply chain and coordinate services across the entire product lifecycle from research and licensing, through clinical trials, cell processing and distribution at the point-of-care. Through this integrated approach, our goal is to lower costs, accelerate speed to market, and make CGTs more accessible to patients.
Our CGT Biotech Platform is comprised of three core components. First is our broad therapeutic pipeline of proprietary and licensed CGTs, which we refer to as “POCare Therapeutics.”Second is our growing suite of proprietary and in-licensed technologies, defined as our “POCare Technologies,” which we customize to enable affordable, point of care manufacturing. Last is our “POCare Network,” a collaborative, international ecosystem of leading research institutes and hospitals committed to clinical development and supply of CGTs at the point of care. The unification of these three components under one organization will enable expedited development of affordable and accessible therapies.
Towards this end, we have been steadily forming key strategic relationships with leading research institutions and hospitals around the world. We are also licensing breakthrough technologies that complement our offering and support our model. As a result, we now have significant expertise and capabilities across a wide range of therapies and supporting technologies, ranging from Tumor Infiltrating Lymphocytes (TILs) to CAR-T and CAR-NK, from dendritic cell technologies to exosomes and bioxomes, to viral vectors and much more. These capabilities have enabled us to launch an aggressive push into a wide array of promising new potential therapies. We’ll be announcing more on each of these development programs in the near future. In the meantime, we have developed a highly efficient and streamlined organization, whereby we are able to share both costs and revenues with our partners in order to avoid the historically high development costs associated with CGT drug development. We believe we have developed a truly unique model with the ability to cost effectively develop and produce CGTs at scale, which we believe has the potential to transform the CGT industry.
I appreciate the patience and support of our shareholders, especially in light of the current pandemic. We are committed to developing innovative solutions to this and other diseases by unlocking the power of cell and gene therapies. It is also important to reiterate that despite the current market turbulence, we have a strong balance sheet and are well positioned to drive long-term shareholder value.”
About Orgenesis
Orgenesis is a pioneering global biotech company which is unlocking the full potential of personalized therapies and closed processing systems through its Cell & Gene Therapy Biotech Platform, with the ultimate aim of providing life changing treatments at the Point of Care to large numbers of patients at low cost. The Platform consists of: (a) POCare Therapeutics, a pipeline of licensed cell and gene therapies (CGTs), and proprietary scientific knowhow; (b) POCare Technologies, a suite of proprietary and in-licensed technologies which are engineered to create customized processing systems for affordable point of care therapies; and (c) POCare Network, a collaborative, international ecosystem of leading research institutes and hospitals committed to clinical development and supply of CGTs at the point of care. By combining science, technologies and a collaborative network, Orgenesis is able to identify the most promising new therapies and provide a pathway for them to reach patients more quickly, more efficiently and at scale, thereby unlocking the power of cell and gene therapy for all. Additional information is available at: www.orgenesis.com.
