InVivo Continues to Rally With New SCI Treatment Strategy

InVivo Therapeutics Holdings Corp. (NASDAQ: NVIV) has made massive strides over the course of this year in the development of its spinal cord injury (SCI) treatment. It is now adding to these gains and running with the bulls on Wednesday morning with news of its most recent strategy.

The company announced a new strategy for the treatment of chronic SCI. InVivo will focus its research efforts for chronic SCI on Bioengineered Neural Trails. Bioengineered Neural Trails are injectable combinations of biomaterials and neural stem cells (NSCs) delivered using minimally invasive surgical instrumentation and techniques to create trails across the chronic injury site.

To support this strategy, InVivo has entered into agreements with the University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego), and James Guest, M.D., Ph.D., to expand the company’s intellectual property portfolio. The company entered into an exclusive license agreement with UC San Diego and an assignment agreement with Dr. Guest, with patents issued for both agreements.

Tom Ulich, M.D., chief scientific officer of InVivo, said:

Our goal is to restore neuronal connectivity and thereby promote neurological recovery in people with chronic SCI. Our minimally-invasive therapeutic approach is to bridge the spinal cord lesion at the time of implantation with a trail of NSCs delivered in an injectable and biodegradable soft, gel-like scaffold. We look forward to presenting our preclinical results in the spinal cords of small and large animals during the Key Opinion Leader Event and Company Update on Thursday.

Mark Perrin, CEO and chairman of InVivo, added:

We are excited about our novel Bioengineered Neural Trails program for the treatment of chronic spinal cord injury. The newly secured patents along with our provisional patent application provide the intellectual property foundation for our Bioengineered Neural Trails program.

So far in 2015, InVivo has outperformed the market, with the stock up 88% year to date. Over the past 52 weeks, the stock is up nearly 150%.

Shares of InVivo were up 5.5% at $10.50 just after Wednesday’s opening bell. Its consensus analyst price target is $25.00, and the 52-week trading range is $3.52 to $19.68.

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