Dr. Kingsman: Oxford BioMedica was setup as a spinout from Oxford University in 1996. We went pretty much straight to the public markets in London at that time. There was a new market called the Alternative Investment Market. We went on to that, raised some initial funds in 1996 and then between 1996 and 2001, raised various amounts of money on the public markets, culminating in the spring of 2001 when we raised £35 million and moved to the main list of the London Stock Exchange. So overall we've taken about £65 million, 95 million out of the public markets. Our lead products are in cancer, although we have very important follow up products in neurobiology with the first one being for Parkinson's disease. Although we have seen excellent improvements in share price since April this year in percentage terms, like many biotech companies at the moment, market cap is still too low.
TWST: Can you bring us up to date with developments in those lead products?
Dr. Kingsman: Yes. We have two lead cancer products, one called TroVax and one called MetXia. TroVax is an immunotherapy; it delivers a protein that is found widely on tumors but it is not found on normal tissue. The protein is presented to the immune system by a pox virus delivery system, and the idea is that it stimulates the body's immune system to mount a powerful immune response against any cell the carries that protein. As I said, that is tumor cells, so it's a tumor-specific immunotherapy. It has gone absolutely brilliantly in its initial clinical trails, met all safety targets and has some strong indications of efficacy; although at this stage these observations are only anecdotal because these are first stage trials. What we are doing now is driving TroVax very aggressively into four phase II studies: two of them in colorectal cancer, one in renal, and one in breast. One has started already, and there will be three more starting this year. The renal and breast cancer programs will be conducted in the USA. And we are aiming to get TroVax ready for phase III studies in 2004. So we aim to have a phase III ready product at the beginning of 2004, which is a big, big change for BioMedica; that has really transformed the company in to a mid stage development company over the last 12 months. MetXia is doing well also. It's a product that’s designed to enhance the efficacy of a chemotherapy product that’s been used for many, many years. That product is called cyclophosphamide. It is off-patent and used very widely, but its efficacy is limited by its toxicity. Our product, MetXia, does something about that by making it much more tumor-specific. MetXia has been going through some very good initial trials and we are driving it into phase II this year in pancreatic cancer, aiming to get that phase III ready by the end of 2004. So that’s really where the lion’s share of the resources is going right now. But as I say, we've got a very strong Parkinson's product coming through and we expect to file an IND for that later this year.
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