Salt Lake City-based PolarityTE’s plans to heal burn wounds by helping skin regenerate has Wall Street’s attention: Company co-founder, CEO and chief scientific officer Denver Lough rang the closing bell Monday at the NASDAQ stock exchange.
By the time he did, the company’s stock was trading for $23.94 a share, up almost 13 percent from its opening price of $22.95.
Operating out of University of Utah Research Park, PolarityTE is developing a product called SkinTE. The company says its technology will be able to regenerate a burn survivor’s healthy skin tissue so that it can be used to heal severe burn wounds with minimal scarring. The company expects to test its process on humans later this year, executives said in June. The regenerated skin also will develop hair follicles, Lough said.
“Skin regeneration will propel us into numerous other arenas,” the company website said, “including bone, muscle, fascia, cartilage and nerve.”
Besides Lough, who previously was a senior plastic surgery resident at Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore, PolarityTE’s management team includes chief operating officer Edward Swanson, chief financial officer John Stetson and chief medical officer Michael Neumeister, who is chairman of the surgery department and an endowed chair in plastic surgery at the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine in Springfield, Ill.