Hi guys, here's an email I was forwarded from a broker
Noxopharm is encouraged by today’s ASX announcement providing data from ESMO Asia 2017, bearing in mind that this is interim data.
In summary, in a majority of patients treated and reviewed to this point, a combination of NOX66 and (low dose ) carboplatin appears to be halting the progression of late-stage cancer in 5 different cancer types.
To understand the basis of that encouragement, it might help to understand what the Company is hoping to achieve out of the study.
The majority of patients with solid cancers (breast, prostate, lung, ovary, melanoma etc) that become metastatic (develop secondaries), eventually become resistant to therapies, and in most of these cases, death almost inevitably will follow.
There are also the elderly and frail patients where it is considered too risky and too damaging to treat them with standard therapies.
There is also a group of people who decline chemotherapy, knowing that the chance of responding comes often with damaging side-effects.
Noxopharm hopes to offer all those patients the potential of a chance of extended survival, without toxic side-effects.
The study reported on today is looking for some evidence that NOX66 can achieve this. The aim is to use NOX66 to make a low dose of a common chemotherapy drug (too low to have any anti-cancer effect on its own, but low enough to be well tolerated), turn into a more powerful drug. The uniqueness of NOX66 lies in the fact that it only works on cancer cells, so that means that it boosts the effect of the chemotherapy drug only on cancer cells and not on healthy cells.
The data in summary:
The study is using patients with late-stage (Stage 4) cancers. They have metastatic cancer (multiple secondaries). They have failed all standard treatment options.
Current effect appears to be achieved across a range of common cancers, not just a single cancer type.
17 patients treated with NOX66 and a low-dose of the chemotherapy drug, carboplatin.
The dose of carboplatin is predicted to be low enough to not cause any serious side-effects, but too low to provide any worthwhile anti-cancer effect.
11 of the 17 patients have completed 3 months of treatment of NOX66 + low dose carboplatin and have had their cancer assessed by scans.
9 of the 11 have shown no disease progression.
1 of the 11 showed partial response ( ie no new lesions, >30% shrinkage of the sum of the longest diameters of the target tumours).
Of the 11 patients, only 1 has shown disease progression.
None of the 11 patients have recorded any serious side-effects.
NOX Price at posting:
78.0¢ Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
