Noxopharm a rare COVID-19 beneficiary with ‘versatile and valuable’ technology platform, says CEO

Noxopharm Ltd (ASX:NOX) chief executive officer and managing director Dr Graham Kelly has highlighted the company’s achievements during COVID-19 in its latest newsletter. He said the company has benefited from the pandemic, with it reinforcing what a versatile and valuable technology platform Noxopharm has developed. More potential and more opportunity “It [NOX] has produced a drug capable of restoring cancer-fighting immune function in a cancer patient, while, at the same time, potentially blocking an inappropriately excessive immune system in a patient infected with SARS-C0V-2 virus," he said. “There is a great deal of repurpose being looked at in this pandemic, but mostly the repurposing has some link, obvious or tenuous, to the original purpose. “In the case of Veyonda® the repurposing is an apparent contradiction, but one that we are well on the way to understanding thanks to the efforts of some very clever scientists we collaborate with around the world. “The more we have come to understand that contradiction, the more insight we have gleaned into the true potential of the platform and the more opportunity we see.” “Exciting pipeline of drugs” Kelly added that opportunity had taken the company into some of the latest and most active areas of interest by the pharmaceutical industry - areas spanning cancer, chronic inflammatory diseases and autoimmune disorders. He said: “The result is an exciting pipeline of drugs now under development within Noxopharm that you will be hearing more about over coming months.” Currently, Noxopharm remains focused on its 4-pillars oncology program and on seeing Veyonda® become a standard go-to drug to boost the effectiveness of a range of anti-cancer therapies. 4-pillars oncology program The 4-pillars oncology program is Noxopharm’s signature clinical program, aiming to prove that Veyonda® can make other common forms of anti-cancer therapy work better. It is testing Veyonda® in the following combinations: Noxopharm has said this was a completely new concept in cancer therapy, made possible only because of a unique collection of anti-cancer functions possessed by idronoxil, the active ingredient in Veyonda®. Where almost all other anticancer drugs operate through a single or very limited specific mechanisms, idronoxil targets a range of tricks employed by cancer cells to resist treatments ranging from the old standards, chemotherapy to radiotherapy, to the new checkpoint inhibitor drug therapies. From stopping cancer cells dividing, to blocking cellular repair mechanisms, to increasing immune cell trafficking, to killing cancer cells outright, idronoxil is a unique multi-purpose, cancer-fighting molecule. LuPIN program Kelly said the LuPIN program was an important program for us because it was the first of the 4-pillars program to reach phase-2 level, "a level known as intent to treat where you get to see how well your new drug is performing". "Phase-2 is where you hope to find proof-of-concept, which in our case is whether adding Veyonda® to another form of anti-cancer therapy makes that other therapy work better. "The question being asked in the LuPIN-1 study was whether Veyonda® was able to boost the effectiveness of the experimental radioligand, 177Lutetium-PSMA-617, an emerging and promising new treatment for late-stage prostate cancer, and to do so in a well-tolerated way." 177Lutetium-PSMA-617 is owned by the large Swiss pharmaceutical company, Novartis. Last Friday, Novartis released data from its VISION study which has now ended. This involved a large (>800) group of men with late-stage prostate cancer receiving 177Lutetium-PSMA-617 compared to standard of care. They report that the mOS of the two groups of patients was 15.3 vs 11.3 months, respectively. That is, the use of 177Lutetium-PSMA-617 delivered a median four-month survival advantage, which for any patient with end-stage cancer is a significant outcome.