NanoViricides (OTCBB:NNVC) saw its shares surge over seven per cent Wednesday, after announcing that president Anil Diwan will lead section 1 of the Symposium on Nanomedicines: Charting a Roadmap to Commercialization, called “Designing Nanomedicines”.
Diwan will lead section 1 of the symposium, being held today and tomorrow in Rockville, Maryland, with Dr. Mostafa Analoui of the Livingston Group. Additionally, NanoViricides’ chief scientific officer Randall Barton will lead section 2, called “Preclinical Pharmacology”, with Dr. Benjamin Yerxa of Liquidia Technologies.
Shares of the company were up 7.09 per cent as at about 12 p.m. EDT, trading at 68 cents.
“Designing Nanomedicines” will provide panelists from various medical universities and research centres across the U.S. with a sampling of the multi-faceted nanomedicine technologies and their current and future applications, the company noted.
The panelists will briefly present design aspects of their respective work in nanomedicines and then discuss several key questions that should be addressed in developing nanomedicines against diseases that currently have no good drugs.
NanoViricides said Diwan will focus on the questions of how to design antiviral biomimetic nanomedicines, the importance of “active” targeting for such drugs, and the company’s success in developing the first ever orally active nanomedicine with its oral FluCide anti-influenza drug candidate.
He will also look at NanoViricides’ success in achieving “broad-spectrum” effectiveness, and the long, sustained effectiveness of the company’s anti-HIV and anti-influenza drug candidates.
NanoViricides' injectable anti-flu drug, NV-INF-1, is intended for use in hospitalized patients with the flu. The company said it believes it will be useable in immuno-compromised populations, and may receive an orphan drug classification for this indication.
Its oral anti-influenza drug candidate, NV-INF-2, may be the first ever nanomedicine drug of any kind that is active when administered orally. This drug is being developed for out-patient influenza cases, and may also be useful for the protection of health care workers.
Both drugs in its FluCide program have shown “very high effectiveness” in preclinical animal studies, NanoViricides noted, routinely showing substantial superiority to Tamiflu, the current standard of care.
The FluCide drugs are intended for use against most types of flu viruses, including H1N1 or the “swine flu”, H3N2, novel strain, and bird flu.
The drugs are based on NanoViricides' biomimetic technology, which mimicks the natural sialic acid receptors for the influenza virus on the surface of a nanoviricide polymeric micelle. The company noted that all flu viruses bind to the sialic acid receptors, even if they rapidly mutate.
“The sustained effect may enable single dose therapy for influenza and other acute viral illnesses,” said NanoViricides in a statement Tuesday.
“In addition, this sustained effect property should result in strong patient benefits for HIV/AIDS patients by reducing the number of times the drug needs to be taken, to perhaps as little as once-a-week.”
The company also noted that a single course treatment for out-patients is a highly sought after goal in influenza therapeutics and that it estimates the market size for anti-influenza drugs to be roughly $4 to $7 billion worldwide. NanoViricides said it believes that if its FluCide drugs become available, the influenza drug market size could expand substantially.
Including the FluCide program, it currently has six “commercially important” drug candidates in its pipeline that together address a market size greater than $40 billion. Those include drugs for use against HIV, viral eye diseases, Herpes, and Dengue viruses.
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