It has been an amazing journey, when you think about it, and...

It has been an amazing journey, when you think about it, and there is much more to come.

Graham Kelly invented Idronoxil over 20 years ago, so the drug is well out of patent protection. Its failure in the OVATURE trial was a devastating setback for shareholders and made no sense - how could a drug that showed such promise deliver ZERO benefit to patients? The transition from intravenous to oral delivery was widely blamed, but this made no sense either, as oral delivery had been effective in earlier tests.

GK never lost faith in Idronoxil, and after he fell terminally ill to prostate cancer and had failed all conventional therapy, Idronoxil was his drug of last resort - but this time it was delivered by suppository in an attempt to prevent Phase II metabolism making the drug inert. At the same time, he was being treated with low-dose radiation to relieve pain caused by large tumours.

As we know, Graham has been FREE of cancer for more than four years. But one of the surprising outcomes of his treatment was the disappearance of tumours that were NOT irradiated - a rare example of an Abscopal response.

It was not clear WHY an abscopal response had occurred, so Noxopharm enlisted the aid of researchers around the world. It was known that some newer drugs had generated abscopal responses to a limited degree, so I imagine researchers honed in on the common elements and then tested their theories in laboratory experiments.

Before making this announcement, Noxopharm will have lodged at least one patent application to protect its discovery. Any application will have reduced theory to practice through a series of experiments, but it is fanciful to suggest that the company should make its trade secrets public before it needs to do so, when such an act would aid competitors.

Immuno-Oncology drugs already generate sales of about $10 Billion per year, even though about 75% of patients achieve no lasting response. Noxopharm collaborators appear to have worked out why I-O drugs fail in most patients and today’s announcements suggests that Veyonda is the missing link that can improve the performance of blockbuster drugs like Keytruda and Opvido. It looks like a clinical trial will soon follow.

Graham Kelly has never lost faith in Idronoxil, and I have never lost faith in Graham Kelly. I have great confidence that he will deliver.