Paradox Pharmaceuticals Inc. is in the process of developing a new anti-cancer drug to be used to treat dogs and cats, and the company hopes to eventually be able to develop similar treatments for humans.
Dogs and cats actually get cancer at about the same rate as humans (at least one in four are likely to get cancer). The National Cancer Institute estimates that roughly six million dogs per year are diagnosed with cancer from an overall U.S. population of 75 million to 80 million companion dogs. Susceptibility to cancer usually begins in pets aged six to eight years old.
Paradox’s current lead compound, benzarubicin, is a veterinary drug used to bypass a number of mechanisms of drug-resistance found in clinical tumors.
“One of the serious side effects of cancer therapy is toxicity to the heart. In fact, with several classes of drugs, the damage is irreversible. An advantage of benzarubicin is that it is non-cardiotoxic, and it can actually protect the heart against other anti-cancer drugs,” says Dr. Len Lothstein, Paradox President and CEO as well as
University of Tennessee Health Science Center (UTHSC) Associate Professor of Pathology and Associate Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences.
Lothstein and collaborators Dr. Mervyn Israel, Dr. Leonard Lothstein, Dr. Trevor Sweatman, Dr. Judith Soberman, Dr. Polly Hofmann and Dr. John Rimoldi founded the company in 2010 with the goal of providing functionally redefined anthracycline antitumor agents for human and veterinary use.
Paradox touts its products as clinically superior to conventional
anthracyclines against drug-resistant cancer, non-cardiotoxic when administered as a single agent, and cardioprotective when given in combination with cardiotoxic antitumor agents.
Lothstein’s interest in this area of research began while he was post-doctoral researcher studying resistance to anti-cancer drugs at Sloan-Kettering and Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.
“My focus and interest shifted from just understanding the mechanism of resistance to designing drugs to circumvent those mechanisms,” he says.
Research and development takes place primarily at the UTHSC and is currently funded by Paradox and by contract with Cumberland Pharmaceuticals, a licensing partner in the development of pivarubicin for the potential treatment of triple-negative breast cancer. While operating independently of UT control, Paradox is commercially linked to UT Research Foundation through a pending licensing agreement for benzarubicin.
“Our decision to develop this as veterinary drug was a mix of both scientific and business reasons,” explains Lothstein. “The business reason is that simply it is extremely expensive to commercially develop a human use drug. We are looking at a price tag that exceeds $1 billion. It’s really in the realm of Big Pharma right now, and even they are having trouble developing new drugs because of the price tags.”
Developing a veterinary anti-tumor drug is considerably cheaper. Lothstein believes Paradox can bring benzarubicin up to FDA approval for about $3 million.
The
One Health initiative is a movement focusing on the realization that animal health and human health are closely tied together and treatment of a condition of a treatment for animals has a great deal of bearing on comparable conditions in humans. In fact, the target lymphoma tumors targeted by Paradox in dogs is molecularly and cellularly similar to human non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
By Michael Waddell
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