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clock Created with Sketch. 28/02/16
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Originally posted by rgc68
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As a certain notorious (but insightful) biotech blogger pointed out some time ago, Benitec is doing a lot of good and important research thanks to funding from its shareholders, but getting anything to market is quite another story. HBV is also a dangerous path to go down from a commercial perspective. Mechanistically it is difficult to see how a drug delivered not through the bloodstream, but by a viral vector, is likely to access all the cells infected by the most virulent organism to infect humans - whereas good going HCV might generate 10,000,000 viruses per millilitre of blood, HBV can generate 1000 times that. The infected liver mass is therefore likely to be much greater than with HCV, and Benitec is using a vector much less hepatotropic (i.e evolved to stably infect liver cells) than either of these viruses. Even if you treat patients on longterm tenofovir, which completely suppresses all HBV replication and thereby prevents infection of new liver cells, to root out the chronic infection you need to inactivate the viral DNA in every infected liver cell. So, from my perspective there are two huge hurdles - to develop a sequence than can reliably inactivate HBV DNA, and get enough of it into the liver - the latter part may be the insurmountable. Mechanistically, correcting gene defects in chronic non-infectious diseases seems like a much more likely bet for a company with limited resources, as you don't have to correct all the defective cells, just enough. Gnarly questions like HBV need lots of resources, and frankly I suggest that a antiviral drug is likely to come along and solve that one long before Benitec does.
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If a partner is secured then I will stay interested. Good in vivo data and a partner are mandatory. Out of the three remainING programs they have decided that hep b is the top priority. It is more advanced than the others and offers the most trial crossover benefits.
Last edited by
Westhx :
28/02/16
