Remyelination in MS: Novoron Bioscience

INTERVIEW WITH DR TRAVIS STILES – CEO, NOVORON BIOSCIENCE

BD: Brett Drummond, MStranslate
TS: Dr Travis Stiles, Novoron Bioscience

BD:  So welcome everyone to our video today.  This video has come off the back of a story that we published a couple of weeks ago based on Novoron Bioscience and the recent grant that they have received to investigate a new potentially novel MS therapy.  As we have said a lot recently on MStranslate, one of our key goals at the moment is to not only talk about the research from our point of view, but to get the people who are actually involved to give you direct insight into what they are doing.  So off the back of that, we got in contact with Novoron Bioscience and luckily we’ve been joined by one of their members today, Dr Travis Stiles.  Travis, thanks for making the time to talk to us.  I guess we’ll start just by you giving an introduction to yourself and telling us a little bit about Novoron Bioscience and how it came to be.

TS:  Well, first of all, thanks for having me.  So Novoron actually started from my dissertation work at the University of California San Diego.  We initially were characterizing a new signaling complex that is involved in regenerative failure in spinal cord injury.  As I was getting closer to graduating and we were expanding on the technology, what we actually found is that the mechanism we were targeting was more ubiquitous for regenerative failure in the central nervous system in general.  So what we originally began focusing on spinal cord injury because it was a very simple system, if you sever a nerve, it does or doesn’t grow back.  We began in 2013 working on the back of a National Institutes of Health grant on spinal cord injury.  The story that you guys [MStranslate] picked up actually is another grant that we just received that extends that work into multiple sclerosis, as we’ve seen that our technology has the ability to promote remyelination in a very similar fashion as it is able to promote nerve re-growth in a spinal cord injury model.

BD:  So that grant that you received, and obviously it is early stages so we can’t talk too much about it, but can you give any sort of information on that project and what it’s looking into?

TS:  Yeah, the big problem in multiple sclerosis is you have this autoimmune component, but then once the immune system becomes dysregulated and you attack the brain, what’s left are these lesions.  These lesions are what are really responsible for the dysfunction and the long-term disability and often it can lead to death, especially over time.  Every single drug that’s on the market, currently, is trying to stop those lesions from forming by suppressing the immune system, but we have nothing on the back-end that can actually repair damage after it happens.  So, what we have seen as I mentioned earlier, is our ability to promote these regenerative processes.  We enhance the body’s natural ability to remyelinate and repair that damage after a lesion forms.  What preliminary studies have shown is that we have validated that our therapeutic target is capable of enhancing that effect.  We’ve developed a drug to capitalize on this and what this grant is really aiming to do is confirm in multiple systems, not just a single system, that we are capable of getting this remyelinating effect.  Really, what we hope to do is really characterize well our drug behavior so that we can define the best possible dosing protocol to maximize the effect.  A lot of the big difference for us transitioning from an academic kind of environment to now actually help create new drugs for patients is once you have a concept you have to create the best possible product, and it gets a little more boring because you have already found the cool thing.  Now we have to maximize the effect, we have to make sure that it works the best way possible and has the least amount of negative side-effects.  So, what this grant really allows us to do is not just keep finding cool things that might help patients, but really develop the best way to take that technology and directly help patients in the maximal benefit, least amount of negative consequences manner possible.

BD:  Fantastic, as I said to you and said to everyone on MStranslate, this is the new wave of hopefully where we are going with MS therapies, that we are moving more into that remyelination and repair side of things, rather than the immunosuppressive side of things, that as you say, we have had for quite a while now.  One thing that could be interesting to people is that we often hear about big pharmaceutical companies and the processes that they go through to get to this level, but you guys are obviously in a slightly smaller space as a biotech company looking after these things yourself.  Can you talk a little bit about the difficulties being in that space and the sort of challenges that you face?

TS:  So the system has really changed in the last, I would say, decade or so.  It used to be that big pharma would pick technologies out of university and develop them in-house with these massive research groups.  But as we’ve seen, companies get larger and larger, at the end of the day how they are evaluated becomes different.  I mean you have these very huge public companies with shareholders and huge boards and things like that and what you can see from that is that even though their capacity is huge and what they are able to accomplish is amazing, they become a little bit more risk adverse.  What has happened now is that instead of this big pharma/university system where there’s this direct linear translation from one to the other, you’ve started to see technology from a university spinning out into companies who are able to directly develop the technology in that commercial gap in order to facilitate large pharma to see less risk in taking that product, so that they can do what they do best, which is the manufacturing, distribution, marketing, direct patient/hospital interactions and dealing with insurance companies.  What they have become less good at as a result of these big, massive infrastructures is that they are not as good with the high-risk type of studies like we’re doing right now.  For example, just as a general example without trying to single anybody out, if you were to go to somebody whose Mum had really advanced Alzheimer’s and say “Hey, I have a way to cure your Mum’s Alzheimer’s, but we have to stab her in the eye to do it…I would say that 90% of people would say, great go for it”.  But large pharmaceutical companies often have a hard time with that level of risk, they are adverse to the commercial concept of “Well, we are stabbing people in the eye”.  So the direct benefit on patients becomes a little bit diluted in the larger scheme of regulatory, FDA or whatever regulatory agencies you are dealing with in your individual country, insurance payers and things like that.  So what we are able to do as a smaller group is:

a) the technology was invented by us, so we are very intimately familiar with it and
b) we’re not bound by those same kind of pragmatic business considerations.  We can actually focus on what makes the best possible singular product for patients.

The results of that, and big pharma has started to recognize that, is that we take on some of the risk upfront and allow them to kind of follow.  In many cases nowadays they will support a lot of the companies like us as an intermediate in the technology development and be able to bridge that gap so that they can do what they do well and we can do what we do well and in the end I think that makes the best possible picture for the patient.  Does that make sense?

BD:  Yeah, certainly and I think one of the things from when we talked the first time about this work is that you feel and the rest of the group feel very passionately about the work that you are doing and the necessity to make sure that it’s as good as it can be.  That was something that really came across to me in the work that you are doing.  Lastly, obviously we are going to be projecting this out to a large number of people with MS, in the space that you are in at the moment, how can people with MS and the larger community support the work that you guys are doing?

TS:  You know, I think when we are talking about any new technology, one of the biggest problems is always going to be funding and it’s always going to be the profile with how people view what you are doing.  When it comes to neurologic conditions, a lot of times people, the growing sentiment of the population that it effects, has a big role in how policy advisors, research foundations and the people who fund the research that is fundamental to treating the disease view problems.  I think one of the great things about what we are doing right now, and what your group does in general, is letting patients know what is being done and what can be done and why this is beneficial.  Remyelination is the critical factor left in improving the lives of MS patients.  The drugs that we have for immune suppression are pretty good, they can get better, curing the disease would obviously be great, where the immune system wasn’t a problem anymore.  But even with fewer attacks, patients are still having this extreme disability.  I think what MS patients, the most direct thing that they can do is become excited about these approaches, the new up and coming phase.  As you mentioned, remyelination is this big thing.  Advocating and going to the people that are on a much higher level and can lobby for the disease and saying these are the things that we think are important, this is what we want to see happen, support this type of research, support these types of groups, support these types of companies.  On top of that, we really value patient interaction, in terms of understanding what the individual experience of patients is.  You know it’s like I said, there’s a risk aversion in certain things with larger companies, but what we don’t necessarily have the same access to is the patient experience.  So we value interacting with patients and understanding, what is it about what we are doing that you like, but also what do you see as being potentially problematic, because we don’t always necessarily think that way, we’re not personally affected by it.  Other than that, I think the best thing about the MS population is that they are highly motivated and they are active and involved.  I think that supporting work, and not just ours, work like ours, and continuing to build on the growing sentiment that this is a valuable area of research.  I think that’s an important part of getting to the point where we can adequately treat these conditions.

BD:  I think that this is the first step in terms of getting out into the community and I think people will be really appreciative of the time that you guys have taken to talk directly to them about the work that you are doing.  We have obviously had some chats that this is hopefully going to be an ongoing collaboration, where we will provide updates throughout the whole process in terms of what’s happening.  For people who are watching, obviously if you do have any comments or feedback that you want to provide, you can either find Novoron online or obviously you can just comment below.  Again, thank you Travis, we will be talking again soon I’m sure.  Are there any last comments that you would like to make for people?

TS:  I really appreciate them taking the time to listen, you know if you are still watching this far into the video, good job, you made it!  We’re really passionate about what we do, our mantra as a company is we want to tackle hard problems, we want to do it in the way that will benefit everyone to the maximal efficiency in the long run.  What we think we have the luxury of doing is we see a difficult journey and potentially complicated business cases as not being worth the potential cost of sacrificing the harder, more complex work upfront to make like what we talked about, the best product possible.  So, I think one of the things that I would like to leave as a final thought is:  sometimes we get people come to us and they say “Well when is your clinical trial?”.  I think that one of the things that I would maybe like to put out there is that when we get to clinical trial it will be because we have put in a tremendous amount of work to make sure that what we take into the clinical trial has the best possible chance of success and that can be a process.  So we are a few years away from that, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t want to talk about it, that doesn’t mean that we don’t want to start engaging people now and understanding, like we mentioned before, patient experiences so that we can think about those things now.  Because we always need to be thinking ahead, but I think like the MS community, we’re committed to the patient experience and we’re committed to patient-based outcomes.  We’re excited to continue having conversations with you guys and keep putting our name out there because we think we have an opportunity to do something cool in this field and we want as many people to be along for the ride as possible.

BD:  Well it goes without saying that we are very excited about the work that you are doing and I’m sure the community is going to be very excited about what you are doing and really excited to continue to share this process with you guys.  So thank you again for your time, much appreciated and we’ll talk soon.

TS:  Thank you very much!

More information on Novoron Bioscience can be found here.