welcome to CEO insights I'm Marilyn dezman with investing news.com I'm speaking with David Regan CEO of Sona nanotech which has been developing promising cancer therapies using biocompatible gold narot welcome David thank you Mary Lan appreciate the opportunity to be here with you yes it's good to have you I want to talk about some recent news that you've put out and that has to do with the efficacy study that you've been conducting uh with Del Housey University could you talk about


some of the highlights of that study and some of the notable outcomes sure well we seem to have stumbled on something really really interesting here and we went into this study with a simple hypothesis that our targeted hypothermia therapy for cancer would shrink cells pardon me tumors from the inside out um which in fact we did in that study but we found something more interesting along the way because in one of the arms of the study as they say we combined our therapy with a standard immunotherapy that's


administered to patients currently uh with an interlukin 2 it's called and what we saw from that combination was a profound impact on the uh on the tumor that caused an immediate and compelling near elimination of the tumor we went in hoping that you know you'd have a an additive effect of combining two therapies together so if amother thpy gives you a sort of the level of one we'd try and get up to 1.5 something like that well of course what we've seen is we effectively took it to a two and a


half to three a true synergistic effect making this uh an extraordinarily interesting uh development for the company that's great to hear so so what are the next steps after that uh those results were released well so there are two streams of next steps one on the academic front um with the study itself uh We've now completed uh the first phase which was in triple negative breast cancer and so now it's on to melanoma and coloral cancer and then on to um on to peer review and Publishing uh now on the commercial side


not just the the academic study but on the commercial side we've now got our work cut out for us um we've been Consulting with regulators and we've gotten great guidance from senior physicians in the US we've are very fortunate to have a a panel of folks that include um uh the surgeons from uh from Harvard and massgen and and rockfeller Cancer Center in Nashville um who have all guided Us in in what we have to do next the studies that we need to put together to show to Regulators so


that we can get this therapy into humans and and see how much of a positive impact we can really create to those who need it most so are those happening in conjunction then so you've mentioned you're doing other cancer therapies uh sorry studies with other other types of cancer and this commercialization so is that happening in conjunction those are those are in tandem in fact and these results have been so promising that we've seen uh we're blasting ahead with the as they call it the pre-clinical trial process


and and those preclinical studies cover three areas there's of course safety which is the Paramount concern of The Regulators uh there's also biocompatibility studies that need to be done and there are further efficacy uh uh studies that need to be done as well this study we've done has been in a triple negative uh breast cancer model in mice and of course triple negative is the the worst kind uh we uh at our practice going forward is to go to the worst cancers where nothing else has


worked and try and create an impact there and if we can have an impact back there we prove ourselves out in the toughest cases uh that's where people need it most too so so maybe this is a good time so sort of to talk about the underlying technology that seems to be working here so could you talk a little bit more about sonus technology your unique technology for and how is it different or unique from other cancer therapies sure marn it's a it's a therapy that's it's an elegant uh


therapy it's an elegant solution we believe and it relies on on two devices uh the first device and of course the name of the company is Sona nanotech is our proprietary gold nanor rods and they're you know very small near atomic scale pieces of inert gold which of course are tolerated in the body well uh which we've known for centuries um those are inserted interally right into the tumor uh we then apply a near infrared light to the tumor think of a laser pointer effectively a a the stronger


laser pointer that passes non-thermal energy light energy in through the tissue when they hit the gold nanor rods the gold nanor rods act as little tuning Forks think of them that way and so if those that light energy is uh is tuned to the right wavelength uh 850 nanometers uh the same wavelength as the gold nanor rods they vibrate and that vibration creates heat and of course heat kills cancer now what's even more interesting about this is that you know cancer cells are more susceptible to


heat than healthy cells so when we control that heat level in the 45 degree range Celsius we can kill selectively the cancer cells without harming the healthy tissue and that's the goal here is you know uh have a therapy that's gently destroying tumors from the inside out without cutting without burning and without poisoning of course as they refer to the standard uh therapies that have been done in the past so you started your study with um breast cancer um is there a particular reason why you started with that and um


talk about you've mentioned this earlier but maybe you can elaborate talk about the other cancers that uh types of cancers that you're looking at sure well uh you know we started with triple negative breast cancer it was the first one implanted in the in in mice um and we've established that it works there and now it's on to uh the gal cancer and the and the melanoma cancer no particular reason for for that one first but but what is interesting I should point out is um each of these


mice have two tumors in them we treat one of the tumors we don't treat the other tumor and so that you can see a comparison of what happens now the fascinating thing that we've seen in this study is not just that the treated tumor shrinks but that you're getting shrinkage in the untreated tumor and the theory behind that is that we are you know gently destroying the cancer cells through a process called apotosis and that enables an almost an orderly breakdown on a cellular level that generates new antigens are


expressed and those new antigens We Believe are triggering a uh a systemic effect and that's what the the second phase in our most recent news came out uh saying it's not just a local to this tumor effect but it's changing the Adaptive immune system of the animal effectively serving as a vaccine so you you mentioned earlier you know when you're doing the efficacy study you're combining it with you know existing immunotherapy drugs so it appears to work better with you know these types of uh this immunotherapy


drugs like marks Kuda why is that so immunotherapy has been the the big push in Cancer Care in the last 10 to 15 years uh and those immunotherapies what they're doing is they're helping your body to fight cancer on its own because of course your body thinks of the cancer as itself so won't attack it and those immunotherapies have in some cases shown extraordinarily good results Unfortunately they only work about 20% of the time depending on the type of cancer so what we've seen in our study is that


our therapy helps them to work better and they do that through that process of oposisi mentioned where we go in we implant our golden Anor rods in the tumor we heat them up we destroy the cancer cells and the cancer cells reveal neoantigens new antigens and the theory is that uh that those immunotherapies uh in the cases then they don't work it's because there isn't a strong enough um immunogenic environment in the uh in the tumor so when you mentioned katuda so it's the largest drug in the world biggest


selling drug in the world $25 billion dollars a year and yet it only works some at the time if we can just have an impact by raising the instances in which there's a response rate from something like a k truda it can have an extraordinary um effect for patients you know wherever they might be very exciting outcome so far in your studies and looking forward to hear more about you know the the the studies that you're going to be doing uh very important studies as well thank you uh David for joining me and sharing yours


news with me today go thank you Mary Lynn we've got a driven team we've got a tremendously strong uh and supportive board and uh and we believe we can do this and we think uh you know we're going to give it a hell of a a shot at it because the results we've seen so so far well early stage are so promising that that we have no choice great good luck uh on future uh works thank you Marilyn and thanks everyone for watching join us again next time for another edition of CEO insights if you like this


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