NanoViricides Inc. (NNVC)

[BonelessCat]

NanoViricides to Ring Opening Bell at New York Stock Exchange

August 12, 2014 06:40 PM Eastern Daylight Time

WEST HAVEN, Conn.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--NanoViricides, Inc. (NYSE MKT: NNVC) (the “Company”), a nanomedicines company developing drugs that viruses would not readily escape, will ring The Opening Bell® at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on Wednesday, August 13, 2014, tomorrow. NanoViricides began trading on NYSE MKT as of September 25, 2013.

“Now we also have the ability to manufacture sufficient quantities of our nanoviricides drugs for small outbreaks such as the current Ebola outbreak in Africa or the MERS outbreak in the Mid-East.”

The event will be webcast on Livestream beginning at 09:26am via the url http://new.livestream.com/NYSE.

“We are proud to ring The Opening Bell on behalf of our team and investors to celebrate our new cGMP manufacturing capability that enables us to move our drug development programs into the clinic rapidly,” said Anil R. Diwan, PhD, President and Chairman of the Company.

“Listing on NYSE MKT has enabled us to raise substantial levels of financing because of which we are now able to restart important R&D programs such as Ebola,” said Dr. Eugene Seymour, MD, MPH, CEO of the Company, adding, “Now we also have the ability to manufacture sufficient quantities of our nanoviricides drugs for small outbreaks such as the current Ebola outbreak in Africa or the MERS outbreak in the Mid-East.”

Dr. Seymour and Dr. Diwan will be joined by other members of the management team and board of directors at the event. In addition to the live webcast, photos and video of the NYSE bell ringing will also be available, courtesy of the NYSE, on Facebook (NYSE), Twitter (@NYSE and @NYSECam), and YouTube (nysetv1).

The Company’s first drug candidate, NV-INF-1, Injectable FluCide™, is designed to treat all influenza infections in hospitalized patients. The Company has a rich pipeline comprising six drug candidates with proven effectiveness against commercially important diseases. These include Injectable FluCide™, Oral FluCide™ for out-patients, DengueCide™ for Dengue Severe Syndrome and Dengue Hemorrhagic Fever, HIVCide™, a potential “functional cure” for HIV/AIDS, HerpeCide™ skin cream for oral and genital herpes, and nanoviricide® eye drops for viruses infecting the eye including conjunctivitis and keratitis causing viruses. In addition, the Company has R&D programs in diseases of important global public health impact such as Rabies, MERS, and Ebola. All of the Company’s programs are in pre-clinical stages, with NV-INF-1 in IND-enabling studies.

The Company’s nanoviricide nanomedicine platform technology has been designed for extremely high effectiveness as well as safety.

The Company’s drugs are based on our biomimetic nanoviricide® platform. A virus-binding ligand is developed to copy the binding site of the virus on the cell surface. A number of ligands are chemically attached into each polymer chain of our nanomicelle backbone polymer. The resulting nanoviricide forms micelles in solution that would “look like” the cell surface to the virus. The virus is expected to bind to it, and the nanomicelle is then thought to engulf the virus, and possibly also to destroy it.

A Virus is not expected to escape a well designed nanoviricide drug because any mutations that allow this to happen would also reduce the ability of the virus to bind to the cell and cause infection.

This biomimicry would also result in nanoviricide drugs that are effective against most if not all viruses of a given kind, making them broad-spectrum antivirals. For example FluCide™ has been shown to be effective against both Type I and Type II influenza viruses, and is expected to be effective against bird flu (H5N1), high path viruses, pandemic and epidemic influenzas, as well as the seasonal influenza viruses. This is because the ligand in FluCide mimics sialic acid, the natural receptor for all influenza viruses.

The Company currently has approximately $41 million cash-in-hand and cash-like-instruments. These funds are estimated to be sufficient for taking at least one of our drug candidates through initial human clinical trials, and possibly take another drug candidate into human clinical trials.

NanoViricides, Inc. now has its own drug manufacturing facility that is capable of producing sufficient quantities of an anti-Ebola drug after it is developed, for combating future Ebola epidemics. This highly customizable nanomedicines cGMP capable pilot scale manufacturing facility will be able to supply all of the nanoviricides drug candidates in quantities needed for human clinical trials.

Thus, NV-INF-1, Injectable FluCide™, has demonstrated unparalleled effectiveness and safety in animal models. Influenza A H1N1 infected animals treated with FluCide survived the full 21-day observation period, whereas animals treated with 40mg/kg/d oseltamivir phosphate (Tamiflu®) survived only 8 days in this highly lethal study. NV-INF-1 demonstrated an unparalleled 1,000-fold reduction in lung viral load compared to untreated animals on day 4 in this lethal animal model study. Moreover, the lung viral load remained suppressed to this baseline level. In contrast, the current standard of care, oseltamivir, (Tamiflu®, Roche) exhibited only a 2-fold reduction in lung viral load at day 4, that rapidly rose by approximately 2X on day 7. NV-INF-1 also caused the lungs of treated animals to remain substantially healthier than the untreated control or oseltamivir-treated mice. Further, NV-INF-1 has been found to be extremely safe in preliminary safety/toxicology studies.