Banyan, Amarantus complete collaboration agreement related to TBI development program

Amarantus BioSciences, Inc. (OTCBB: AMBS), a biotechnology company developing new treatments for brain-related disorders including traumatic brain injury (TBI) based on its proprietary anti-apoptotic therapeutic protein known as MANF and Banyan Biomarkers, the leader in developing in vitro diagnostic products to detect TBI, today announced the successful completion of a collaboration agreement initiated in November 2011 to evaluate MANF's potential as a disease-modifying agent for the treatment of TBI.

"Based on the results produced through this collaboration, we are excited about the potential of the MANF Program in generating new products to treat concussions and other forms of TBI," said Gerald Commissiong, President & CEO of Amarantus. "While this data is early on in development, we will be looking for innovative approaches to accelerate our TBI development program, while using Banyan's proprietary panel of markers as a key metric in our companion drug – diagnostic strategy."

In in-vitro cell culture experiments, MANF was reproducibly shown to confer neuroprotective properties in various cell death-related pathways. The data raise the possibility that modulating MANF in patients immediately after suffering a TBI and in patients who have suffered multiple concussions over an extended period, could be a successful therapeutic approach to promote recovery after TBI.

"The data shows that MANF has a significant ability to reduce cell death from a variety of insults that simulate Traumatic Brain Injury as we have modeled in multiple assays in our internal laboratories at Banyan," said Dr. Andreas Jeromin, PhD, Senior Director Research at Banyan, "These data give us confidence to move to the next phase of testing to further validate this approach, as well as look at innovative product development strategies to accelerate bringing a MANF-based treatment to patients for TBI."