Moncton Company Investigating Possible Covid-19 Treatment With Cancer Drug
MONCTON – As Soricimed Biopharma seeks to bring its cancer drug candidate SOR-C13 to market, it’s also investigating whether it could be effective to treat Covid-19 patients.
SOR-C13, which already received orphan drug designation to treat ovarian and pancreatic cancer from the U.S. FDA, is now in the human clinical trial stage at the MD Anderson Cancer Centre in Houston, Texas.
“Developing treatments for cancer is not a fast pass to market,” said CEO Robert Bruce, adding that it’s even harder to conduct trials during a pandemic. “But the organization has received all of the appropriate FDA and Health Canada approvals…So we’re making real progress and we’re actively looking to accelerate that progress over the next 18 months.”
SOR-C13 is a peptide that binds with the TRPV6 calcium channel within cancer cells. In healthy cells, the TRPV6 is very small. But it’s “overexpressed by tens and hundred and a thousand times over” in cancer cells, carrying a significantly higher amount of calcium. SOR-C13 restricts the flow of calcium and starves the cancer cell, stopping its growth.
The drug has been tested on 15 patients, and Soricimed is “seeing real indications of efficacy” even with very low doses, Bruce said. It now has to go through Phase II of the clinical trial to finalize its safety data, including determining the maximum tolerated dosage, and confirm the efficacy of the drug through an expanded cohort. Soricimed aims to conclude trials and get the drug to market in the next two years.
It’s been relying on “a large number of private local shareholders” for years, Bruce said. It’s now seeking to raise an additional $3- to $5-million to speed up development and advance deeper into Phase II trials before it goes outside the region for capital.
“We think that this is the last raise that we’ll be doing in the region, and then we’ll be following this up with an institutional raise, a [life science] sector raise, within the next 12 months after that,” Bruce said.
Covid-19 Application
Soricimed’s scientists initially didn’t think the drug would be applicable to treat Covid-19. But studies began to come out noting that one of the things that may have made Covid-19 patients really sick is something called Cytokine Storms.
It’s a condition in which the body’s immune system “goes haywire,” Bruce said, attacking its own cells and tissues rather than just fighting off the virus.
“There was the reference that the Cytokine Storm was being fueled by calcium,” Bruce said. “That’s where we said, ‘wait a minute now, we know our mechanism of action is a calcium blocker’.”
If the calcium fueling the Cytokine Storms are coming through the TRPV6 channel, Soricimed might already have a drug that could reduce the calcium going into the channel and thus, relieve or prevent a severe immune response to Covid-19 in patients.
The company put together a white paper and sent it for review by experts in the field, including senior researchers at Dalhousie University, senior respirologists, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the U.S., and the National Research Council Canada.
“Everybody came back and said this has merit and deserves additional review,” Bruce said.
Soricimed tested its premise using an advanced computerized model focused on Covid-19 at the University of Paris (also known as the Sorbonne University). It found that SOR-C13 binds to the virus. They found the same result when testing it at the lab using components of the virus.
Bruce says these are very “simplistic” tests but the result was enough for Soricimed to get serious with developing a Covid-19 treatment.
With the safety data for SOR-C13 already at hand from previous cancer trials, Bruce said Soricimed wants to “immediately going into Phase II clinical trial” for the Covid-19 application this year.
If proven efficient, SOR-C13 won’t work like a vaccine. Rather, it would prevent someone infected with Covid-19 from getting very sick. That would help lower the rate of mortality and hospitalizations.
Although several Covid-19 vaccines have been rolled out in Canada and globally, Soricimed will continue its development of the drug. Bruce said other pharmaceutical companies working on Covid-19 treatments haven’t stopped either, because the vaccines still cannot cover certain demographics, including young people and pregnant women.
Some of the vaccines are also not easy to deploy. The Pfizer vaccine, for instance, is very sensitive to temperature changes and demands strict controls, which means it could reach certain parts of the world much later.
SOR-C13, on the other hand, can be stored at room temperature and is “incredibly stable,” Bruce said.
He said the best news for Soricimed would be that there’s no need for SOR-C13 as a Covid-19 treatment.
“But until that happens, we don’t know. And if we [stop], we’ll lose the next six months of development for potential other applications here. And we can’t do that,” Bruce said. “As long as there’s still a need, we should continue to move forward in our science.”
Soricimed is now working to find the site, resources and funding for a trial to take place in Canada. It hopes for quick approval to do so, and confirm effectiveness by the second half of this year.
“Depending on how strong that information is, you can accelerate,” Bruce said. “The one thing that’s very clear is when it relates to Covid-19, your typical development times don’t apply. So it’s all about whether or not you have data coming back that tells you if something’s working [or not].”