The rate at which a virus like influenza adapts and evolves
has always been a subject for concern in the medical community, with vaccine
technology only barely able to keep up from year to year. In many cases, as was
the case this year, the latest vaccine for the latest strain is largely
ineffective, with this season’s flu vaccine only obtaining around 23 percent
efficacy according to the CDC’s own data (a figure which has dropped to as low
as 10 percent in the past). However, in recent years this concern has given way
to an increasing degree of outright alarm among savvy epidemiologists, upon
whom it is now dawning that, without some serious technological innovation, we
may soon be hitting a brick wall with public health crisis written all over it.
Just this week, the first Influenza fatality for the current
season was reported in the state of Idaho, where 32 people died from
flu-related illness last year. As many as 49,000 or more have died in the U.S.
in a given year since the CDC started tracking such data over four decades ago.
The majority of flu-associated deaths are typically in people over 65, and
influenza vaccines are currently the most popular and widely accepted
vaccination amongst adults.
As is typical, influenza vaccines accounted for the lion’s
share of the $33.1 billion vaccine market last year. A market which is on track
to hit upwards of $57.8 billion by 2019, growing at a CAGR of around 11.8
percent, according to a report from MarketsandMarkets out earlier this year.
The market is currently dominated by a handful of major players like Merck
(NYSE: MRK), Glaxo Smith Kline (NYSE: GSK) and Sanofi (NYSE: SNY), with smaller
positions held by the likes of Pfizer (NYSE: PFE) and Abbott Laboratories
(NYSE: ABT), as well as CSL Limited (ASX: CSL), which acquired Novartis’ (NYSE:
NVS) vaccine business earlier this year, including the influenza vaccines
development pipeline.
The kind of forward growth projection contained in the
MarketsandMarkets report is quite reasonable considering the increasing public
attention about influenza in recent years, following the swine flu (Influenza
A, H1N1) pandemic in 2009, and the avian/swine flu scares since. The rapidity
with which influenza viruses mutate (driven by underlying, gradual antigenic
drift), which can and has resulted in cross-species mobility into human
populations for avian/swine flu, is one of the leading sources for the
increasing alarm. Just this week, officials at the Hong Kong Centre for Health
Protection confirmed the presence of avian influenza (AH7N9) in two humans from
mainland China who have had routine exposure to poultry, both of whom are
currently hospitalized and in serious condition.
Such news is particularly alarming when one stops to consider
the mounting evidence that we may be approaching the end of antibiotics as we
have come to know them. A daunting problem which has been illustrated most
recently by a report in the Lancet Infectious Diseases Journal on
plasmid-mediated resistance to the last-resort antibiotic Colistin in animals
and human beings in China. The decades-old antibiotic Colistin is only used as
a last-resort these days in cases where multidrug-resistant bacteria are
encountered, due to significant liver toxicity risk. Thus, this report has
really raised eyebrows among many in the medical community, who are concerned
that even stopgap measures like Colistin are becoming ineffective.
Luckily, we have some extremely compelling work being done
in this area by a development-stage nanobiopharma company called NanoViricides
(NYSE: NNVC), which has developed a novel nanoviricide® class of drug
candidates that employ an ingenious and wholly unique approach to antiviral
therapeutics involving nanomaterials. The company’s incredibly versatile
nanoviricide platform has the potential to address a wide range of underserved
and unserved demands, with pipeline indications under development ranging from
its injectable/oral FluCide™ for influenza and the HerpeCide™ indication for
herpesvirus, to candidates that may one day become the leading combatants of
such devastating diseases as HIV or Ebola.
What really makes the company’s proprietary nanoviricide
technology so interesting is its exploitation of an as-yet critically under
examined property among even fast-mutating viruses, where the receptor binding
site does not substantially change across iterations. This ingenious approach
grants the nanoviricide platform’s method of action immense versatility that is
unparalleled anywhere else in the industry today, and allows for the
development of both virus-specific and broad-spectrum indications. By pairing a
maximally-expressed virus-binding ligand made from the binding site on the
virus cell’s own surface receptors, with a proprietary nanomicelle flexible
polymer, the company is able to create molecular smart bombs that seek out and
attach to virus cells, and yet which look to the virus like an extremely tasty
normal human cell.
The virus is fooled into attacking the antibody-scale
nanoviricide and is then fully engulfed by the highly flexible nanomicelle
polymer in what is effectively a nano-scale Velcro effect, completely stopping
the virus from infecting any more cells, degrading the protein shell of the
virus, and outrightly dismantling it. This brilliant method of action stands in
stark contrast to what most current entry and fusion inhibitors do, blocking
only some of the binding sites, which leaves the virus cell able to infect
other cells. This method of action is also expected to be far superior to
similarly-large antibody agents as well, because it does not require the often
already compromised immune system of the host to clear the virus particle, and
instead is able to destroy the virus particle on its own.
Moreover, the company’s already successfully demonstrated
ADIF technology (Accurate-Drug-In-Field) represents a lightweight, field-deployable
frontline defensive and offensive solution for novel or emergent, quickly
mutating strains like Ebola. The ADIF technology allows emergency medical
responders to rapid-prototype an accurate drug on-site, anywhere in the world
an outbreak might occur. This capacity means that NNVC holds the power to
potentially allow medical professionals to safely combat the most dangerous
infectious diseases, as well as bioterrorism agents directly, before they can
spread and become a more serious issue for an increasingly connected world.
This is a key advantage for NNVC that investors should keep
an eye on, especially considering the latest Ebola scare in Africa, with news
breaking that as of December 15, seventeen suspected Ebola patients have gone
missing from a healthcare facility in the Liberian capital of Monrovia, after a
mob attacked the facility on Saturday. We could be looking at the start of
another Ebola outbreak surge (previously thought to be contained), tipped off
by this incident in Liberia, which has not had a history of the disease until
recently, but which saw more than 400 fatalities alone due to the disease after
the outbreak began last year. This now apparently ongoing outbreak, which began
in Guinea two years ago this month, has also caused significant loss of life in
Sierra Leone, and even managed to reach the U.S. and EU, forcing governments to
critically reassess the potential severity of such a problem.
Dig deeper into this company’s revolutionary tech by
visiting http://www.nanoviricides.com/
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