Medical Device industry makes a run at Pharma in the HCV space...

Posted 8/9/12 on The OTC Investor.com. Aethlon Medical is serious about it's Hemopurifier, a blood filtration device being looked at for several indications. If it is indeed capable of lowering HCV viral load to a point where pegylated interferon and ribavirin could be more effective and bump up response rates over 50% with less toxicity... and can do so at a cost lower than that of Direct Acting Antiviral combination therapy... Aethlon may be on to something. Yet another reason not to dismiss interferon just yet. 

Bristol’s Halted Hepatitis C Trial Reinforces Aethlon Medical’s Non-Toxic Therapy
By Paul Archie · Thursday, August 9th, 2012

In the biotechnology world, the sun rises and set around the two key words “safety” and “efficacy.”  A serious safety concern last week resulted in Bristol-Myers Squibb (NYSE: BMY) voluntarily halting its ongoing Phase 2 study of BMS-986094, a drug in development as a new indication for hepatitis C as part of the drug maker’s quest for an all-oral regimen for hep C.  A patient who had received a 200 milligram dose of the nucleotide polymerase inhibitor, or “nuke,” suffered heart failure; causing Bristol to stop the trial and begin evaluating participants to determine any correlation between the new drug and the heart damage.

In February, Bristol paid $2.5 billion to acquire Inhibitex, a 163-percent premium to the valuation of Inhibitex at that time, primarily to snag its hepatitis C drug candidate (then called INX-189).  The halted trial could seriously hamper Bristol in its race with Gilead (NASDAQ: GILD) and Abbott Labs (NYSE: ABT) to bring a new hepatitis C drug to market.  It is widely expected that an all-oral drug therapy for the liver disease that affects about 170 million people across the world will generate billions annually in sales.  It is the reason that Bristol paid the premium for Inhibitex and Gilead dished-out $11.1 billion last November to acquire Pharmassets and its hep C drug in development.

Investors that recognize the upside potential of new therapies for hepatitis C should be taking a close look at Aethlon Medical (OTCBB: AEMD), the maker of a first-in-class blood filtration device called the Hemopurifier®.  Recently released clinical research by Aethlon showed that the two most recent hepatitis C-infected patients to receive its Hemopurifier® therapy in combination with the standard of care peginterferon+ribavirin (PR) drug therapy achieved undetectable viral load at day-7.  In lay terms, that means that none of the hepatitis C virus was found in the patients’ bloodstream after seven days of treatment.

As an adjunct, the Aethlon Hemopurifier® selectively targets the rapid clearance of the hepatitis C virus from the entire circulatory system to improve benefit, dose, duration and tolerability of drug therapies.  Drugs, like that of Bristol, Gilead or Abbott, carry substantial safety risks because they are “additive” in nature, meaning that they are putting a foreign substance into the body.  Aethlon’s Hemopurifier® is “subtractive.”  It removes the virus through a proprietary filtering process, which does not carry the same, potentially deadly toxicity risks that can cost major pharma billions to finally realize.

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