Breakthrough Cancer Therapy? This Biotech Shares Preclinical Data and Ambitious Plans

Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

The following post was written and/or published as a collaboration between Benzinga’s in-house sponsored content team and a financial partner of Benzinga.

If the experimental drug that DeoBioSciences Inc. (DBS) is trying to validate as a potent treatment for advanced or metastatic solid cancers continues to replicate its results to-date, then the world may have hit another milestone in its decades-long fight against the deadly disease.

Cancer, one of humankind’s worst enemies for many centuries, could be in for a battle royale. But before patients can jump out of their sickbeds to jubilate and the world might breathe a sigh of relief, the company says it has some hurdles to cross.

While DeoBioSciences’ biomolecule, code named DBX-31, sounds promising, the company is preparing to conduct further preclinical—and hopefully clinical—trials to prove to regulators, the scientific community, and the world that it has genuinely struck anticancer gold.

Insurmountable Obstacle or Incredible Opportunity?

It’s understandable why one might be skeptical about “promising” cancer research given how long cancer has ravaged the world while evading a solution from some of the world’s brightest minds. It’s no secret that the American scientific and medical community has been on a 50-year battle to cure cancer beginning, in earnest, since the “War on Cancer” was declared in 1971. 

According to the World Health Organization, cancer is the 2nd-leading cause of death globally, claiming an estimated 9.6 million lives — that is 1 in 6 deaths — in 2018.  So, stating that many cancers are difficult to treat may be obvious. By their nature, this group of stubborn diseases can start in almost any organ or tissue of the body when abnormal cells grow irrepressibly and spread to other organs and parts of the body. These abnormalities pose challenges to scientists who still face several hurdles as current therapies don’t work in all patients or against all cancers, leading to the loss of lives.

However, research into cancer and the production of drugs for it, like any other disease, presents a huge market opportunity for the global pharmaceutical industry ― estimated at an astonishing $1.11 trillion. That’s part of the reason why some well-known global pharmaceutical giants such as AstraZeneca plc AZN, Pfizer Inc. PFE, and Novartis International AG NVS are trying to cure cancer.

The standard treatment regimens are decades old and include chemotherapy, which uses certain drugs to kill cancer cells or stop them from growing. Oncologists may prescribe “chemo” by itself or they can also combine it with surgery or radiation therapy or any of the dozens of modern drugs on the market. These drugs are often combined to create what’s commonly called a personalized drug “cocktail.” Drugs like Revlimid, Opdivo, Keytruda, Herceptin, Avastin, Rituxan, Imbruvica, Neulasta/Peglasta, Ibrance, and Zytiga were the top-selling prescriptions for cancer in 2018.

Possibly Unique Capabilities

DeoBioSciences is a small but ambitious preclinical stage biotech startup that’s reverse engineering DBX-31 from its current natural form, as a selectively cytotoxic compound, toward its desired state as a potential, recombinantly synthesized anti-cancer therapy for people and, possibly, dogs and cats.

The company believes DBX-31 has the potential to address a wide range of high-need cancer indications if it can navigate the daunting regulatory path to market approval.

Results from independent research conducted at Cornell University showed DBX-31’s ability to kill every single one of the diverse, advanced-stage metastatic cancer cell lines that were tested, in a concentration-dependent manner, without harming noncancerous cells.

The drug candidate showed targeted biospecificity both in lab conditions and, based on anecdotal data involving living organisms, under observational studies, covering numerous types of solid tumors. Although no hematological malignancies have been tested yet, the company believes the potential market of treatable indications based on current data still represents a sizable percentage of the underserved cancer patient population.  

John Adamson, co-founder and CEO of DeoBioSciences, told Benzinga that eventually, if things go well with solid tumors, the company will “move into hematological malignancies as well.”

Better Than Chemo Drugs on the Market?

Given the record of failure that so many research programs in the past have experienced in trying to “cure” cancer, why should anyone have optimism for the prospects of DBX-31, especially at this early stage?  

“In the course of our experiments, we outperformed two of the most potent (Food and Drug Administration) FDA-approved multibillion-dollar chemo drugs and other experimental cytotoxic drug candidates, against identical cancer cells from the same patients,” Adamson said.

“But nobody is claiming that we’ve proven a treatment for anything yet, not to mention a cure,” said Adamson. “We’re very aware that nothing short of an approved BLA (Biologics License Application) or NDA (New Drug Application) by the FDA in the U.S., or the international equivalent, allows us to declare that. We also know the route to that can be expensive and long. However, we also know that the ability to selectively target and kill cancer cells that other approved drugs cannot kill via extrinsic apoptosis is the mark of a highly coveted drug candidate, even at the early stages.”   

“We’ve shown the ability to exclusively kill a wide range of tough, treatment-resistant, highly mutated, cancer types in a way that other powerful cytotoxins could not. That’s noteworthy, to say the least, and almost certainly confirms that we’ve discovered a new death receptor or new epitope (binding site) on an existing receptor.”

The company is not alone in appreciation of its preclinical results as it shared that multiple global pharmaceutical and biotechnology players have met with them and confirmed interest in potential partnering depending on the next set of test results.

“Our next phase of development represents a potentially dramatic inflection point because it will provide data that is 90% to 98% reliable in predicting our future clinical trial results,” Adamson said. “If we repeat our prior test results, we can dramatically de-risk our next round of R&D (research and development) and be in a much better position for partnerships and further investment.”

At the next stage of R&D, DeoBioSciences is planning to evaluate DBX-31 in a special mouse model called orthotopic patient-derived xenografts (OPDX) in the same tissue types that it says it’s already seen success in.

“The preclinical in vitro data, which we’ve already obtained, can be statistically predictive of clinical outcomes under the right conditions, based on published studies by revered institutions like the National Cancer Institute of Canada, and DBX-31 has met the majority of those right conditions, so far,” Adamson said. “However, we want to complement our current results with indisputable data from the ‘gold standard’ of predictive ‘in vivo’ translational models: OPDX models.”

DeoBioSciences says DBX-31 and its potential are gaining a lot of traction — evident from the company’s equity crowdfunding campaign on netcapital.com that has received investor interest from around the world. Says Adamson, “Our various stakeholders understand that we’re early-stage but would rather join us today than regret missing out on us later.”

The preceding post was written and/or published as a collaboration between Benzinga’s in-house sponsored content team and a financial partner of Benzinga. Although the piece is not and should not be construed as editorial content, the sponsored content team works to ensure that any and all information contained within is true and accurate to the best of their knowledge and research. This content is for informational purposes only and not intended to be investing advice.