Flavocure Biotech, a drug company founded by Jamaican scientist Dr Henry Lowe, has raised funds for phase-one clinical trials for Caflanone, one of its cancer drugs.
CEO Ngeh Toyang said the US$1.2 million raised would fund preparations for the trial.
“More funds will be raised for the full clinical trial,” Toyang told the Financial Gleaner.
Flavocure raised the funds last month, filings to the US Securities & Exchange Commission indicate. Three investors had already taken up the offer at the time of the filings.
Flavocure, based in Maryland in the United States, now awaits the go-ahead from the US Food and Drug Administration, FDA, to begin trials. When that happens, the trial itself should last six to 18 months, everything else being equal, Toyang said.
In general, there are three phases prior to the commercialisation of a drug. The process can take over a decade to move from development to preclinical trials to clinical trials, prior to going to market. It also costs millions of US dollars.
Flavocure has pipelines for three products made from two cancer drugs, Caflanone and Cresorol, according to the Flavocure website. Caflanone focuses on treating pancreatic cancer, but it also separately treats GBM-brain tumour cancer and bone marrow myeloma cancer. The third product, Cresorol, treats acute myeloid leukaemia.
In 2019, Flavocure received ‘orphan drug’ approval from the FDA for developing a cannabis-derived drug, FBL-03G, which treats pancreatic cancer. At the time, Dr Lowe, executive chairman of Flavocure, described the sourced cannabis plant as a rare strain and difficult to locate outside Jamaica.
“Yes, this is the same drug and it is now called Caflanone,” Toyang confirmed.
The FDA’s orphan drug approval indicates that there are upwards of 200,000 patients with the condition that the drug is intended to treat. Pancreatic cancer remains the third most common cause of death among cancer patients in the United States after cancers of the lung and colon, according to the US National Cancer Institute.
In 2017, Flavocure also received FDA orphan drug status for the development of Cresorol, another drug developed from cannabis.
In November 2018, Flavocure received an injection of capital from Canadian firm Atlas Biotechnologies Inc in exchange for a 20 per cent stake in the cannabis research firm. Atlas reportedly paid US$5.75 million for the stake, then valuing Lowe’s outfit at US$29 million.
Lowe had planned to list the private company on an overseas and local stock market in the first or second quarter of 2020. However, the plans were derailed after the world was overcome by a health crisis and subsequent market upheavals, with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic that year.
steven.jackson@gleanerjm.com
