Biotech Values

[DewDiligence]

Calgary Herald article on OXGN’s treatment of one patient with myopic macular degeneration:

This is the patient who was the subject of OXGN’s PR on Dec 10, in which the company stated its intention to step up the development of its clinical program in AMD: http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/031210/105113_1.html .

[Annotations in italics by Dew]

http://www.canada.com/calgary/calgaryherald/story.asp?id=88C5B8A6-5992-42E5-A032-C820CB29D52C

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Eye ailment cure sighted

Experimental drug works for city man

David Heyman
Calgary Herald

Wednesday, December 31, 2003

When the first grounder got by him in the summer of 2002, shortstop Andrew Marriott of Calgary gave himself an error on the play and shrugged it off.

But the more baseballs he bobbled, the more the 34-year-old realized his eyes, not his reflexes, were letting him down, and he decided he needed to see an eye doctor.

After several conventional treatments in the fall and winter were unsuccessful, Marriott's ophthalmologist gave him the bad news last Feb. 8 -- he had wet macular degeneration in his left eye, a condition where renegade blood vessels grow out of control and leak under the retina, destroying vision. [This is an error –the actual condition was myopic macular degeneration, a rare disease which tends to affect younger adults than wet AMD.]

Simply put, he had a 40 per cent chance of going blind in both eyes by the end of the year.

Marriott -- athletic and otherwise healthy -- was stunned into tears. The manager of design for Tim Hortons feared he would have to change careers, give up driving and perhaps even have to sell his house. By the summer of 2003, he was already using computer fonts three to four times normal size in his design work.

"The worst part is waking up every day and noticing how much your eyesight is going," he said.

"Every month I would have to increase my font size."

Today, however, the 35-year-old Marriott has 20/20 vision when he wears glasses, thanks to a promising new drug designed to treat cancer but which is also being tested on those with age-related macular degeneration at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md.

Marriott was just the fifth person to be given the drug, called Combretastatin. He was too young to join the 20 others in the current trial [the minimum age in the AMD trial was 50] but was given a series of four doses on a compassionate basis. Because of that, he is the only person to have his results published.

Combretastatin targets immature blood vessels and prevents them from growing further. Its developer, Oxigene, wants to use it to fight cancer because it can shut off the growing blood flow to tumours necessary for them to expand and spread, and the company has begun clinical trials on it in the U.S. and Europe. [There are currently six trials in progress for Combretastatin (a.k.a. CA4P), five in cancer and one in AMD.]

Other scientists believe Combretastatin may be effective in fighting age-related macular degeneration, which has led to the new trial at Johns Hopkins.

While Johns Hopkins researchers are strongly cautioning that a good response in one patient is not scientifically meaningful, there is cause for hope, say U.S. experts.

"The results achieved in this patient are especially significant and provide great hope for other patients with myopic macular degeneration," said Gerald Chader, PhD, chief scientific officer of the Foundation Fighting Blindness, which is funding the wet age-related macular degeneration trial. [This is the same Dr. Chader who spoke at GENR’s Aug 4 CC.]

"These patients have few treatment options and ultimately experience debilitating vision loss," said Chader, who is also a former scientific director of the National Eye Institute.

Marriott was able to get the drug, which is delivered intravenously, only because he refused to accept his fate.

Shortly after his diagnosis, he used the Internet to locate several eye experts in the U.S. to find out if anyone was working on a cure for his condition. He then spent tens of thousands of dollars visiting these specialists and, despite several rejections, convinced a Johns Hopkins scientist to let him try Combretastatin on a compassionate basis.

He paid nearly $2,000 for the visit to the Maryland campus in September and said he noticed a difference hours later -- he could suddenly read the score of a basketball game on TV when just the day before it would have been illegible. When he returned to work, he found he could read a normal-sized computer font.

Today, he must cope with short-sightedness, but is thankful to be able to see at all. He is most grateful to the people at the Foundation Fighting Blindness who agreed to help him and are paying thousands of dollars for his treatment.

He's also grateful that his ophthalmologist was so blunt about his predicament. His bleak assessment forced Marriott into quick action and gave him the momentum he needed to endure the rejections from so many drug companies and scientists that turned him down.

"All I need is a few people to tell me that I can't do it, and it will light a bigger fire," he said.

dheyman@theherald. canwest.com
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