Virus-Based Therapies

Conventional cancer treatments rely on a relatively non-specific strategy for killing proliferating cells in the body. Both chemotherapy and radiotherapy are highly toxic regimens, because due to their limited selectivity, these cancer treatments destroy healthy proliferating cells as well.

Neotropix is on the cutting edge of cancer treatment and takes a very different approach to cancer treatment.  Neotropix™ Inc. develops and commercializes systemically deliverable oncolytic viruses for the treatment of neuroendocrine tumors, such as small cell lung cancer and neuroblastoma. Capitalizing on its unique sources of naturally occurring viruses that selectively target tumors, the Company has the knowledge and skills to translate these discoveries into commercial products. Neotropix is committed to making a difference in the lives of cancer patients.

The concept of using an oncolytic virus to treat cancer has significant advantages over other types of cancer treatments being utilized or tested today. Benefits of NTX-010 as a cancer treatment are:

* NTX-010 is highly selective:

Many viruses have exquisite selectivity, or tropism, to infect and kill only certain types of cells.  A highly specific cancer treatment minimizes negative bilateral effects on healthy cells. In the case of chemotherapy and radiotherapy, not only are cancer cells destroyed, but healthy cells are also damaged, which gives these cancer treatments poor toxicity and tolerability profiles.

* NTX-010 keeps on working:

A single systemic administration of an oncolytic virus should minimally infect all permissive tumor masses, known and unknown, as well as permissive metastatic cancer cells circulating in the blood and lymph systems. Upon infection of a cancer cell, the virus produces more virus that spills out of the dying cell to amplify the dose within the tumor and infect additional cancer cells. Thus, oncolytic virotherapy should be more efficacious, less toxic, require less starting material and require fewer, if any, repeat doses than traditional cancer treatments, such as chemotherapy, radiation, or monoclonal antibody therapy.

We have developed and are now testing the NTX-010 virus as a small cell lung cancer treatment and as a treatment of pediatric cancers, such as neuroblastoma. This virus infects neuroendocrine tumor cells specifically, without infecting healthy human cells. For example, once a small cell lung cancer cell is infected with NTX-010, the virus replicates as any other virus, but only spreads to other small cell lung cancer cells. The small cell lung cancer cells die, while the healthy cells remain uninfected and alive.