06 Oct Stratatech lands federal contract worth nearly $250 million for its skin tissue to treat burns
By Judy Newman, Wisconsin State Journal
Stratatech Corp., a Madison company developing skin tissue products to treat burn victims, is getting a federal contract that could pay the company up to $247 million over five years — mainly because the government wants to stockpile the tissue in case of a nuclear attack by terrorists.
The Project BioShield contract with the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) will let Stratatech continue tests on burn patients and apply for FDA approval to sell its StrataGraft skin tissue commercially.
Even before the Food and Drug Administration acts, though, BARDA wants to set up an inventory of StrataGraft tissue, for use “in case of a natural or man-made mass casualty emergency,” the company said.
“This is a major, major opportunity for our company, and a unique one,” Stratatech CEO Lynn Allen-Hoffmann said in an interview Monday.
A study of patients with serious burns, released in March, showed that in 27 of 28 cases, StrataGraft skin tissue applied just once healed the wounds completely within three months, and in some cases, looked better than the burns treated using a graft of the patient’s own skin, called an autograft. Read more …
On the web: Stratatech press release