By: Dylan Sikes - AllPennyStocks.com News

Tuesday, May 6, 2014

Investors sometimes focus only on new drugs and ignore the importance of new drug delivery technologies that can rejuvenate and improve existing drugs to treat many diseases representing areas of great unmet medical need. Innovation comes in many forms and deviating from conventional thinking could be the passe-partout to a new wave of effective treatments for deadly and debilitating diseases of today. There are many different approaches, each of which is promising in its own right to bring new therapeutics to market. To name just a few, there are cell encapsulation technologies, of Nuvilex, Inc. (OTCQB:NVLX) being advanced in clinical trials for pancreatic cancer and nanotechnologies of newly-public NanoAntibiotics, Inc. (OTCQB:NNAB) that are targeting inhibiting bacteria’s efflux pumps to address the growing problem of antibiotic resistance and superbugs. Vancouver-based BiOasis Technologies Inc. (TSX-Venture:BTI) (OTCQX:BIOAF) is focused on the blood-brain barrier to tackle brain diseases such as neurodegeneration, metastatic cancer and metabolic diseases. The company’s flagship product, dubbed “Transcend,” is a proprietary protein vector that allows existing drugs to be shuttled across the blood-brain barrier.

The blood-brain barrier represents one of the most challenging components of the body. It plays a critical role in protecting the brain, serving as an interface between the blood and central nervous system, designed to keep unhealthy materials out and only let important nano-sized particles pass back and forth. To that point, getting drugs that can help brain disease and conditions to pass the blood-brain barrier is extremely difficult either by a simple matter of size or because they are not recognized as native and essentially find the doors locked to reach their target.

Research on BiOasis’s Transcend has shown that Transcend can be conjugated with therapeutic molecules to transport the therapies across the blood-brain barrier. This could be a revolutionary breakthrough by offering the potential to treat a variety of diseases by taking drugs to the cellular level of the brain.

BiOasis in March signed an evaluation agreement with MedImmune, the global biologics research and development arm of AstraZeneca (NYSE:AZN). MedImmune intends to evaluate the efficacy of its pre-clinical assets with next generation versions of Transcend brain delivery platform. In 2007, AstraZeneca paid $58 per share, or $15.2 billion to acquire MedImmune to accelerate its biologics strategies.

On Tuesday, BiOasis said that a newly discovered peptide vector form of Transcend, called Transcendpep, has been shown to deliver small-interfering RMA (siRNA) across the blood-brain barrier. This opens the door to new possibilities for BiOasis and its Transcend platform, given a growing body of evidence about the potential of siRNA to treat diseases by targeting specific genes to cause or modify disease outcomes as part of the broader prospect of RNA interference (RNAi). The problem with siRNA has been the same as with many other promising therapeutics: they can’t cross the blood-brain barrier, this first on the back of Transcendpep has significant implications.

“Transcendpep-siRNA constructs thus become a potential cornerstone technology for development of new therapeutics for brain disorders, including, cancers of the brain, Alzheimer's disease, Huntington's disease, Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and other neuropsychiatric diseases, and for a variety of neuromuscular diseases, pain, and infections,” BiOasis said in a statement on Tuesday.

Toronto-listed shares of BiOasis have had a strong past three months, rising from a low of 67 cents in February to as high as $1.35 in March. Shares have cooled from the high since, closing yesterday at 93 cents. Shares closed up over 5 percent on Tuesday’s news, trading at 98 cents.

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