Travel to Find International Private Capital to finance development of Hemispherian's lead glioblastoma multiforme therapeutic

Gliomas constitute 60% of all brain tumors and 50% of these are considered aggressive malignant tumors. Among aggressive gliomas, Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) is the deadliest. Patients with GBM, which is the most frequent and malignant form of glioma, present a median overall survival of approximately 15 months after diagnosis. This is mainly due to the poor and unpredictable response to the standard-of-care therapy that includes radio- and chemotherapy, after surgical resection. Importantly, in children, GBM is the most frequent solid neoplastic disorder and the primary cancer-related cause of death. Despite devastating prognosis, there are only 3 FDA approved drugs to treat GBM, all providing only marginal improvements of <5 months to patient survival, and there are no drugs approved for malignant pediatric brain tumors. The lack of therapies is primarily due to the inability of drugs to penetrate the blood-brain barrier (BBB), the greatest challenge in GBM drug development and the limiting factor to changing standard of care (SoC). In detail, primary treatment for newly diagnosed GBM consists of surgical resection and radiotherapy (RT) and one or more courses of generally ineffective chemotherapy; however, this intense treatment is limited to patients with high Karnofsky scores (low impairment). Even if there is complete tumor removal, GBM recurs in 80% of cases. Therefore, the goal of primary treatment is to alleviate symptoms associated with intracranial pressure and increase survival time. In order to tackle this problem, Hemispherian has developed two promising lead compounds – called GLIX1 and GLIX5 respectively – that showed to be highly efficient in targeting GBM malignant cells. Unlike competitors (immunotherapies that can target, at best, 20-30% of the GBM population), GLIX1 – which is a nucleotide analogue – may target a novel mechanism that acts as a barrier to replication, enabling us to target most GBM patients, and other cancers in the future.