On January 10, Pluristem Therapeutics Inc. (PSTI) announced its collaboration with Tnuva for establishing a cultured food platform. Consequently, the stock was trading at $1.85 apiece premarket at the last check on Monday.
In the previous session, the stock traded between a high of $1.43 and a low of $1.52 at 88.07K shares. PSTI closed the session at $1.47 with a gain of 3.52% on Friday. Following the announcement, the stock gained a huge 25.85% premarket. At the time of writing, the stock was trading heavily at a before-hours volume of 1.8 million shares.
More About PSTI
The clinical-stage cell therapy development company, Pluristem Therapeutics Inc. was founded in 2001. Currently, its 32.1 million outstanding shares trade at a market capitalization of $47.19 million. Moreover, PSTI stock has lost 2.65% in the past few days with a slight gain of 0.68% year to date. In the past year, the stock subtracted a huge 82.69%.
Collaboration with Tnuva
According to Today’s announcement, the company has launched an innovative collaboration with the Tnuva Group. Under the collaboration, the companies will develop, manufacture, and commercialize cultured cell-based products for the food industry. Furthermore, the collaboration has commenced with the incorporation of a new company (NewCo). The NewCo will attain exclusive, global, royalty-bearing licensing rights for utilizing PSTI’s technology along with its intellectual property for use in cultured meat fields.
As per pre-money valuation of $40 million, Tnuva will invest $7.5 million in NewCo. Added to this, Tnuva has an option of investing an additional $7.5 million in NewCo over a 12-month period after the closing. As per the terms of the agreement, PSTI will support the activities of NewCo concerned with its establishment and R&D. Further, NewCo will promote its mission with its own funding, resources, and management team. In exchange for the R&D platform, Tnuva will attain preferred marketing rights of NewCo’s developed products in Israel.
In addition, NewCo’s Proof of Concept is expected in 2022 with the first raw cultured meat product launch in 2023.
PSTI’s Other Developments
On December 27, the company reported topline results from its Phase II studies of PLX-PAD cells intramuscular injections. The studies were evaluating the injections for the treatment of ARDS (Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome) associated with Covid-19.
According to the results, the study failed to achieve the primary endpoint of statistically significant improvement of Ventilator Free Days at 28 days.
