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/
