TRANSCRIPTION OF FINANCE NEWS NETWORK INTERVIEW WITH DANISH PARMACEUTICAL COMPANY, NOVONORDISK, VICE CHAIRMAN, DR. GÖRAN ANDO.
Clive Tompkins: Hello Clive Tompkins reporting for the Finance News Network. Joining me from CBio is board member Dr. Göran Ando.
Göran welcome to FNN. You’re a founding fellow of the American College of Rheumatology – how much progress have you seen in the treatment of the disease in your lifetime?
Dr. Göran Ando: Thank you Clive, good to be here. I have been fortunate to see a lot of progress in the treatment of especially Rheumatoid Arthritis. As you know it is a terrible disease, it typically affects people in their most productive years - more females than males. But it really hits them – pain, swollenness of the joints and over time the joints just get destructed, so you can do less and less. In the last decade we’ve seen a tremendous uplift in the treatment. So called anti-TNF drugs have really been a revolution for patients who take them and respond to them - you see not only alleviation of the symptoms, but actually you see that the progression of the disease, i.e. that they get worse and worse – stops. That to me is a fantastic improvement in how we treat them.
Clive Tompkins: Can you put into perspective the work that CBio are doing?
Dr. Göran Ando: I think the first thing to start with is to recognise that although we’ve made tremendous advances in therapy, still between thirty and forty percent of all patients actually don’t respond to the anti-TNFs that I talked about previously - and further a group of patients will have so severe side affects that they have to stop. So there is still a huge unmet medical need for new therapies, better therapies in the treatment of rheumatic diseases. If you then look at what CBio does, we have a new potential medicine called XToll. It’s a naturally occurring protein that actually exists in both you and me, and this is slightly modified. What we know is that this protein in its natural state actually protects the body against stress, so it actually activates with stress. We also know that it is a powerful anti inflammatory and as such, we are trying to use that part of its activity. We’ve seen in both animal studies and now in very early studies in man, that it does seem to be very active and very efficacious – and so far we have been fortunate not to see too many serious adverse events either. So we think this has the potential to be a complementary medicine to the anti-TNFs.
Clive Tompkins: You are also Vice Chairman of Danish Pharmaceutical Company, NovoNordisk which has an option over CBio’s drug XToll. Can you explain to our Australian audience a bit about NovoNordisk?
Dr. Göran Ando: NovoNordisk is mostly known to be the world leader in the manufacture of insulin and insulin analogues for the treatment of diabetes. It’s an old company, it’s been around for a long time - it is now by market capitalisation actually Denmark’s largest company. It employs about twenty-seven, twenty-eight thousand people around the world with its headquarters in Copenhagen in Denmark. And strong company, growing fast and have recently also shown an interest in researching and developing drugs for the treatment of inflammatory diseases.
Clive Tompkins: NovoNordisk’s website lists four major therapy areas. Is NovoNordisk’s interest in XToll a move into autoimmune and inflammatory diseases?
Dr. Göran Ando: You could say it’s one signal of it. NovoNordisk recently opened its own research centre in Seattle in U.S totally devoted to inflammatory diseases - but they’ve also sourced new innovation from other companies, typically small Biotech companies including XToll, so it is showing a very significant interest in this group of devastating diseases.
Clive Tompkins: NovoNordisk has an option to proceed with development of XToll upon completion of clinical trials. How significant is this?
Dr. Göran Ando: First it’s important that you realise I am on the board of both companies so obviously I excuse myself from all discussions on the option agreement. However, I think if you look at it from CBio’s stand point, it is an important validation both of the science and of the results in clinical trials to date that a big company like NovoNordisk takes an interest, see the opportunity both scientifically and commercially – enough for them to sign an option agreement.
Clive Tompkins: Working and residing in Europe, how do you see the Australian drug development market?
Dr. Goron Ando: I think it’s first important to recognise that Australia has absolute world class science in the entire medical field – has had for many years and as far as I can see, continue to have that. So the discovery efforts here are second to none. Where perhaps you see chances to improve is on the ‘D’ side of research and development. You see much less of that actually both what we call pre-clinical development, before you have first test in mind, toxicology etc. But also manufacturing, much less expertise here in Australia and also there has been difficulties to access the very significant funds that is needed to develop a new drug. So overall you see potential here that is perhaps not totally fulfilled.
Clive Tompkins: Last question. When we spoke with CBio Managing Director, Jason Yates, he mentioned the high cost in bringing a drug to market. How will a successful IPO at this stage impact on the development of XToll?
Dr. Göran Ando: It’s absolutely vital that we have a successful IPO because it will give us the funds that are necessary both to complete the ongoing, very significant clinical trial, showing what we hope the efficacy and the safety of XToll. It will also allow us to scale up the manufacturing into a commercial method and finally, it will allow us to explore also if XToll is efficacious in other autoimmune or rheumatic diseases like psoriasis, like lupus etc - all potentially enhancing the value of XToll.
Clive Tompkins: Dr. Ando, thanks for giving us a better understanding of the work at CBio.
Dr. Göran Ando: Thank you so much Clive.
