Noxopharm Limited (ASX:NOX) Managing Director & CEO, Dr Graham Kelly, discusses the company’s trial portfolio and most promising applications for its lead drug candidate NOX66.

Noxopharm Limited (ASX:NOX) is an Australian biotechnology company. It’s involved in drug discovery in the fields of oncology and a number of different non-oncology fields. Our first drug to come into the clinic is called NOX66, it’s an anti-cancer drug and its intended to make existing therapies work better.

We’re running five clinical trials this year for a very good reason. That is that we’re going to compress our whole drug development program. Instead of doing the usual three-step process, we’ll bring it down to two. So at this stage, we hope to be in registration studies next year (2018). That means when we get to that point, we need to know exactly how to use this drug and that’s why we’re doing five studies now.

The first study we’re running is using NOX66 in combination with the chemotherapy drug, carboplatin. The whole idea is to see whether we can make carboplatin work in patients, where you would not currently expect it to work and to get a meaningful anti-cancer effect. As to why we’re running it in Georgia, it’s becoming quite a popular place now to run oncology drug trials. They have a very good healthcare system. They are well set up to run clinical trials and that’s why we were attracted to go there.

There are another four studies that we’ve yet to speak about. They are all in the process of starting right now. And over the next two to three months, we expect that they will gradually roll out and we can talk about them. As to where they’re being done, some are being done here in Australia and others up in Asia. We hope that we’ll be able to inform the market about progress in any of these studies, during the course of this year. So all five studies are meant to provide readouts, over the course of the next 12 to 15 months.

The potential for NOX66, if we see some positive clinical signs over the course of the next 12 to 15 months, that potential is enormous, because currently existing therapies don’t offer an awful lot. Certainly if you are diagnosed with an aggressive metastatic cancer, that is a cancer that’s moved away from its original site. The odds are against you surviving that in the end. We believe that NOX66 has the capacity to make existing therapies do something meaningful for these people.

I’ve just come back from Hong Kong. That’s because we see Hong Kong as providing a springboard into Asia, which we believe is going to be important for the company’s future. We have a relationship with a number of researchers up there; we hope to be running clinical studies. We have a number of important shareholders and funds that are showing interest in the company. So we’ve established a subsidiary company in Hong Kong and the aim is to, as I said before, make that a bridgehead into Asia.

One of the specific projects that we’re running up in Hong Kong is a study that we are doing in collaboration with a group, at the University of Hong Kong. And this has to do with brain cancer, because we recently showed that NOX66 enables the active drug in NOX66, to cross the blood brain barrier and enter the brain. And that makes it a highly unusual and highly valuable opportunity, because the key thing in treating brain cancer is to be able to get your drug into the brain. And very very few chemotherapy drugs do that. So the work we’re doing with the University of Hong Kong is intended to bring NOX66 into the clinic, for the treatment of brain cancer.

I think the shareholders and the market generally are going to see a substantial news flow, over the next six months. With five clinical studies to start, and to be reported on, along with a number of important R&D projects that we have yet to talk about, I think there’s going to be a substantial news flow.

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