Interview with Brad Thomas

As we move to the end of the year, Oncolytics Biotech makes good on its promises to deliver good news as it presents today at the National Cancer Research Institute (NCRI) confrence in Birmingham, U.K..

The following is an excerpt of somewhat dated interview, but bears listening to as it guides us to what we should expect in late 2007 and early 2008.

Interview from wallst.net with Brad Thomas by Ian Roberts
July 6, 2007

IR: Good morning, thank you for joining us and taking time here out of your schedule. Now I understand that the company has some quite encouraging news and developments that represent a significant period of time for this company, aggressively pursuing the phase II program and as well as some recent positive studies. Can you give us a sense really of this company’s story from an overview, outline, and your current market focus and market opportunity.

BT: Our current focus is primarily upon our product that’s in clinical development at this time which is called Reolysin. And I think Reolysin is an interesting product just because of the potential breadth of activity that it has in humans. At least in the lab when you exam any particular cancer, most of the ones that people tend think about, prostate, breast, non small cell lung, colorectal, that kind of normal group of cancers. This product should work anywhere between two thirds to seventy-five percent of each one of those. And that kind of breadth activity is kind of uncommon and it’s really relatively unique for therapies that are under development. So going under clinical studies we had this very good sense that if we did it right, we find the right dosing, we find right combinations, that there should be something there. And so that’s been the basis of our clinical program. Recently we’ve had some very encouraging hints of things coming out of our early stage activities. We recently announced our first US final results from our phase I systemic study there. It was kind of a remarkable situation there, it’s a safety study primarily, phase I studies, but with the dosing regime we were using we expected to see nothing or relatively close to nothing beyond the safety. Of course it was, as a safety profile, that we expected it to be the product is actually quite safe. The patients we were looking at had rapidly progressing disease and I think 8 out 18 were stable disease or better including one good solid partial response measured over very long durations of time. And to go from rapid progressive disease to stable disease like that with usually just a single administration of the product, just one time, while your sitting there reading a book getting an IV for forty minutes is remarkable, honestly it is something that was completely unexpected. Very encouraging. We are very pleased with that. From that we are moving on to a pretty broad based phase II study later this year. All things going correctly we should have eight phase II studies going on all at the same time. Both in the US and UK and a variety of those will be monotherapy studies in things like sarcoma, melanomas, brain cancers, and ovarian cancer; and in combination with existing drugs looking at things like prostate, lung, and ovarian primarily. It’s going to be interesting to see with all those studies going on at the same time exactly how this product works clinically and once we have the results of those studies, which should start coming late this year and early next year, then we will be able to decide specifically a couple of registration paths and get in to doing the pivotal studies which is what it’s all about. It’s a really interesting time for us and it’s really really reassuring to be going into the full blown phase II programs having seen so many very encouraging signs in our earlier studies.

Listen to the complete interview here