Emerging Australian oncology company Noxopharm (ASX:NOX) has used its annual general meeting to update investors on the development of its pipeline.
Noxopharm was established in 2015 by Dr Graham Kelly and he now serves as its executive chairman. Dr Kelly has a long history in the Australian biopharmaceutical industry having founded Norvet in 1994, which subsequently changed its name to Novogen, and is now Kazia Therapeutics.
The company's pipeline is headlined by VEYONDA, previously known as NOX-66, a first-in-class dual-acting cytotoxic and immuno-oncology therapy designed to enhance the effectiveness and safety of both chemotherapy and radiotherapy.
Dr Kelly told yesterday's meeting the company believes VEYONDA has "the potential to become a commonly-used anti-cancer drug within a few years."
It is being trialled as monotherapy and in combination with chemotherapy and immunotherapy.
The company recently updated on interim data from the DARRT-1 study where VEYONDA is being tested in patients with metastatic prostate cancer.
The objective of DARRT-1 is for VEYONDA to trigger a general immune response. This means achieving an anti-cancer response in the tumours in the body after delivering radiotherapy to just one or two individual tumours.
The clinical objectives are greater pain relief, a better quality of life, and longer survival in patients where palliative care is the current standard of care.
According to the company at yesterday's annual general meeting, the absence of disease progression at 6-months in around 50 per cent of patients could be suggestive of a positive overall survival outcome. It also highlighted the unmet patient need and the opportunity for expedited regulatory review.
Noxopharm chief commercial officer Alex Hunter told the meeting its financial priorities are to further develop the operating model, secure funding and build commercial relationships in the US, with the already stated goal of listing in the US to support the ongoing development of VEYONDA.