STARPHARMA (SPHRY)

[Michael Scofield]

Intriguing Biotech Stocks from Australia

http://www.equities.com/editors-desk/stocks/healthcare/intriguing-biotech-stocks-from-australia

Another company moving up the price charts is Starpharma Holdings Ltd. (SPL:ASX). It has a dendrimer-based delivery technology that delivers established chemotherapy drugs using a scaffold that makes them soluble, more efficacious and safer. Dendrimers are a very special type of spherical polymer that can be manufactured with a high degree of precision and consistency to have specific physical and chemical properties.
The company has terrific preclinical data. In relation to safety, Starpharma has shown, in animal models, that combining its scaffold with a well-known cancer drug such as docetaxel significantly reduces a side effect called neutropenia (diminished white blood cell count). Chemotherapy wipes out a lot of white blood cells, and this leaves patients highly susceptible to infections. A lot of cancer patients develop neutropenia while on chemotherapy, and many get infections and die as a result. But neutropenia is a short-term condition. It occurs within three days of the chemotherapy. The white blood cell count usually returns to normal in seven or eight days. However, for those seven or eight days, patients are very vulnerable, and preventing neutropenia will end up saving lives.
The Starpharma technology is currently in a Phase 1 dose escalation trial. It is starting to hit doses typically used in the clinic, at which point one would normally see a high level of neutropenia and hair loss. None of the patients in the trial so far have shown either. It is in very early days, but Starpharma is a very exciting company. There are a couple of companies in the U.S.— BIND Therapeutics Inc. (BIND) and Cerulean Pharma Inc. ($CERU) —trying to do the same type of thing. I have looked extensively at their results, and while they show positive data in terms of efficacy, as far as I can tell, they have not shown a major benefit in terms of reducing the devastating side effects of the chemotherapy.
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