Exposure is building for OncoSec and it has come on its own, due to its results.
When a former Merck research labs executive director speaks, the scientific community listens. A graduate of Yale College and the Brown University School of Medicine, Dr. Pierce has put his career on the line for OncoSec, and people are beginning to pay attention. The same writer of the piece “Merck’s Melanoma Label Perplexes, Disappoints” with an interview of Dr. Pierce was written on September 17, 2014, for a blog that teaches about the latest news and developments in Life Sciences, just wrote an article for BioWorld Online. It is the news service of record for the biotechnology industry and is updated every business morning, owned by Thomson Reuters. Randy Osborne, who has been a writer and editor in biotech for 15 years mostly at BioWorld, just wrote “Body electric: Oncosec sings praise of booster bid for immunotherapy”, which will be on the December 1 Monday morning update. In it he discusses the approval of Merck’s Keytruda for melanoma ahead of its Oct. 28 PDUFA date, and how it has opened the door for the promising class of programmed cell death-1 (PD-1) inhibitors while representing another step towards immunotherapy in cancer. He estimates the sale of cancer immunotherapies to be as high as $30 billion by 2025, and expects for more than half of cancer therapies to have immunotherapy as their backbone within the next decade. Keytruda is to be only used in patients with advanced melanoma who are no longer responding to other drugs. But as much as 70 percent of patients do not respond to the drug, and finding a way to change this could mean big money.
This time he interviews Punit, "Even though melanoma is a very tractable tumor type," said Punit Dhillon, CEO of Oncosec, tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) are in short supply with the disease, and the "low-TIL environment" keeps PD-1 drugs such as Keytruda from working in more patients. "What we can do with Immunopulse, specifically because we're using IL-12, is bring the immune cells to that environment," he told BioWorld Today.
"There are a lot of different choices out there for delivery – such as viruses, lipids or other biologic means," Dhillon said, but electroporation has the benefit of being "very clean, with no side effects or lingering issues left over." Oncosec, he said, is "the only company doing it intratumorally and the first company delivering gene therapy using in vivo electroporation," though other firms are advancing in somewhat similar areas. Dhillon cited as an example Inovio Pharmaceuticals Inc., of Plymouth Meeting, Pa., which delivers into muscle. "We believe it's important to bring the fight to the tumor and have the specific antigen response in the tumor micro-environment," he said.
And ends the article with "Melanoma represents a low-hanging opportunity for us" given the "awesome" data in phase I and phase II trials, Dhillon said. "The monotherapy results speak for themselves. It's pretty unbelievable to see the response in untreated lesions." Conclusion, people will start listening.
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