Health and Healthcare

Aytu BioScience Reemphasizes Coronavirus Stock Status With Potential Treatment

Chris Lange

Published: April 27, 2020 10:19 am

Aytu BioScience Inc. (NASDAQ: AYTU) shares made an incredible gain to start the week following the firm’s announcement in regards to a coronavirus treatment. Specifically, Aytu announced that it had signed an agreement with Sterling Medical Devices to finalize the development of Healight, a novel endotracheal catheter, as a potential treatment for coronavirus.

Last week, the company announced a licensed exclusive worldwide rights agreement to the Healight technology from Cedars-Sinai for all endotracheal and nasopharyngeal indications. The patent-pending Healight platform has been in development since 2016 by the Medically Associated Science and Technology team at Cedars-Sinai. Following their preclinical findings that Healight may be a safe and effective antiviral and antibacterial treatment, the team engaged Sterling to rapidly develop a novel endotracheal device to help combat coronavirus.

Ultimately, management believes the Healight platform technology has the potential to positively affect outcomes for critically ill patients infected with coronavirus and other infections. Aytu, with support of the team at Cedars-Sinai, is working with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to determine an expedited regulatory process to potentially enable near-term use of the technology initially as a coronavirus intervention for critically ill intubated patients.

Josh Disbrow, board chair and chief executive of Aytu BioScience, commented:

The Aytu team is very pleased to be working with Sterling Medical on this important development program and in the fight against coronavirus. Sterling has a stellar reputation as a best-in-class medical device product firm with more than 21 years of experience, over 1,100 projects engineered, with none failing to receive FDA regulatory approval upon submission. Our team is actively engaged with our colleagues at Sterling in an effort to finalize the device development, with hope of enabling human use in the very near future.

Aytu BioScience stock traded up about 33% to $1.86 Monday morning. The 52-week range is $0.34 to $2.99, and the consensus price target is $3.75.