Amarantus Biosciences Inc (OTC:AMBS) shares Soar 159% On Hefty Volume

AMARANTUS BIOSCIENCES INC(OTC:AMBS) shares had an amazing run up in Thursday’s session and soared 158.54% to $0.0212 on hefty volume of 34.29 million shares – almost 6X its average volume of 5.66 million shares.

Amarantus Biosciences is a Biotechnology company that develops new diagnostics and treatment procedures for Traumatic Brain Injury and Parkinson’s disease focusing on proprietary anti-apoptosis protein MANF. The company announced that it plans on pursuing the identification of one or multiple therapeutic indications for its MANF, its lead therapeutic candidate, which could result in therapy receiving orphan drug designations with the FDA (Food and Drug Administration).

The strategy is based on exploiting MANF’s exclusive mechanism of action associated with proper protein folding and processing in the endoplasmic reticulum so as to recognize rare and/ or ultra rare ailments where MANF treatment procedures play an important role in enhancing patient outcomes in disease states where no other treatment alternatives are presently available.

CEO and President of Amarantus, Gerald E. Commissiong said that protein misfolding and aggregation plays an important role in a wide range of human ailments, taking into account diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s and also a number of rare and ultra-rare diseases. He also said that MANF has a distinctive ability to intervene in protein folding in an extracellular manner, making it potentially an ideal biologic drug candidate for a wide variety of human conditions.

Parkinson’s still is the primary focus of the company, especially in light of recently declared data where MANF described superiority over GDNF in a neurostoration animal model of Parkinson’s disease. The recent grant that the company was awarded with by the Center of Excellence in Apoptosis Research will, however, let Amarantus’ scientific team to explore utility of MANF in diseases that have much smaller patient populations. Amarantus wants to make a concerted effort to focus on rare and ultra-rare diseases when reviewing the results. This strategy is likely to show the company an accelerated pathway to commercialization by recognizing therapeutic applications for MANF that would need a few clinical trials. Data that has been already shared from databases available publicly indicate that this orphan designation plan may turn out well for the company in the near term.