Fighting Cancer Drug Resistance Through Innovation

0:00Hey, I like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres and if you'd like to apply to be a guest in the show, to set on over to MissionMatters.com and click on be our guest to apply. All right, so today I have John, you on the line and he's CEO and chairman over at Kairos Farma and we're going to get into a couple of things here today. So we're of course going to get into the work that he's doing over at Kairos Farma and also talk about cancer drug resistance. And I know they got a big need to feature coming up too. I want to get into that a little bit more but I'm not going to spill it on that one yet. John, welcome to the show. Thank you again Adam for having me. All right, so we got a lot to talk about here today and first thing first. So I see the 310 so you're in LA too, yeah? Yes, we're right in between Beverly Hills and West Los Angeles. We're actually on the company members are all investigators here at Cedar Sinai Medical Center and we run the company out of the medical center.

1:01That's amazing. Let's get into Kairos Farma a bit first off. So maybe you just start by giving us a little bit of an overview of the company. Sure, we're a public company on the NYSE American. We went public approximately two years ago from a private company in order to access the public markets for larger clinical trials. We're in a phase two trial in prostate cancer and the phase one trial in lung cancer and we developed a drug called EMV 105 which reverses resistance when patients develop resistance to the drugs that they're on for these cancers. I do want to go further into that but maybe I should take a step back like how did you get in this business? Where that began? Yeah, so we were we're all lab rats. I'm a neurosurgeon by training and you know I do operations mainly on patients with brain tumors and particularly the most

2:01malignant brain tumor glioblastoma is an exceedingly difficult cancer to treat and the survival is measured in months, the median survival is 14 months and clearly requires new and novel therapies in order to you know push the boundaries forward and as we develop these therapeutics in the lab it's very difficult to get them to patients. There is what's called the Valley of Death where therapeutics die because you can't get them into clinical trials. It costs a lot of money to get them into clinical trials usually upwards of two million dollars and then to do clinical trials it's usually upwards of ten million dollars in national institutes of health funding and other sources of funding. Generally don't fund large trials like that and so in order to cross this Valley of Death we formed a company and in order to access capital that was larger we went public

3:02and we were fortunate to meet the listing criteria at the New York Stock Exchange and we rang the bell about two years ago and went public and we've been going at it since. It's really just to cross this Valley of Death of Therapeutics so once we develop these drugs in the lab it's a means of trying to get them into patients through clinical trials and then potentially to commercialize them either going out on it on our own or through partnerships with large pharma companies that will take it forward into the commercialization stage. All right so I got to ask this question. Nero surgeon, public company, how do you manage this stuff? Obviously your brain's are coming on but I get that but but how do you manage this man? I can't really manage the podcast. Well thank you thanks for asking. They're complimentary things like I said I run a lab and in order to get you know and then it

4:03work on new therapies for cancer and again in order to get them into patients that's why we started the company and it does take up time both the company part as well as surgeries but I have a good team of people that help with the surgeries and with the patients and we manage to get them the highest levels of treatment at the hospital and also we run the company with very good people that can get used clinical trials across the finish line and so there's some benefits of being in an academic setting as well as in the public company and the academic part helps in that you know for one I have a personal connection with patients and so I see them battle their cancers and they see when their tumors come back because the cancer has developed a resistance to the drugs they're on and so not only is this a scientific question but it's a pretty humanistic one in that you know

5:05I believe the main part of my job is to give patients hope and when these cancers return you know you really see the hope leave these patients eyes and so we try to provide them hope based on good science and having identified mechanisms of resistance and developing drugs for resistance and we're really here to give hope not only with surgeries but with new drugs and the other part of you know having this this connection with the hospital as well as with the company is that being in an academic setting gives us access to national grants and funding agencies like the NIH and the Department of Defense I guess the Department of War now but we have a $3.2 million grant that supports phase two prostate trial with a biomarker biomarker allows us to determine which patients will respond to the drug versus not so that we can really tailor the treatment to the patients that needed the most and then we have another DOD Department of Defense grants of $2 million for our

6:09lung cancer trial doing a similar thing in our lung cancer trial also our clinical trials you know we have a consortium with other clinical centers including the Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic and Stanford and other centers and so this allows us to do our company trials in a very rapid and organized fashion through this consortium and finally last but not least being in this academic setting really gives us access to the intellectual capital of physicians and scientists that are you know at the top of their game in clinical treatments and in new science developing new therapies so we really like to have the access to that that intellectual capital to be able to utilize it consult them and bring that expertise into the company as well. The way you describe it it seems like a pretty I don't know like a stimulating environment yeah like you're around about to rock off it let me say it differently your bunch around a bunch of rock stars you got great resources

7:10like a deep bench of talent and and all mission aligned and focused on saving lives I found amazing yeah despite the you know the horrible nature of cancer you know we're really working with some great people and it really is a joy to be able to you know fight this disease with such interesting people that are really at the top of their game yeah it's great let's switching here slightly and getting into the actual drug part of it specifically cancer drugs and the resistance aspect of this like I guess we'll I'll start here with the bases like what is the cause for resistance to cancer drugs and how can that be addressed yeah so it's very similar to when bacteria become resistant to antibiotics you know they're bacterial strains that that become resistance and no longer susceptible to antibiotics and this is because all all organisms on the planet have this will to live and this desire to compete with other lives to to be able to survive

8:13and in the very similar fashion cancers have this will to live too and so it's an ongoing battle between cancers in the body is the cancers try to take over the body when and use fly of the body to grow even further and the way cancers do this is they become more primordial and what I mean by that is they become more like cancer stem cells and to take you to an example cancer stem cells are like normal stem cells each organ of our body has normal stem cells which replenishes those cells of that organ and even the brain has neural stem cells that replenishes all the cells of the brain in a similar fashion cancer stem cells are the cells that replenish all the cells of a particular cancer and so only the stem cells have the ability to divide without end to adenosium so these are the primordial cells that really feed the cancer and drive it because normal stem cells

9:14and cancer stem cells their evil twin are such important cells of either the organ or the cancer they need to be able to survive and withstand all the toxins and radiation of the environment like normal stem cells and cancer stems are designed to do the same thing so they develop mechanisms to survive the onslaught of radiation and therapy that we use to treat it and so these cancer stem cells they can withstand all the drugs of the body and so we can kill all that sort of daughter cells that arise from the cancer stem cells but we can't very efficiently kill those cancer stem cells and so what happens is when a cancer is being treated they become more like cancer stem cells and then they become resistant to the drugs that are used to treat it and we found the actual biochemical mechanism by which this happens and Neobomic or T-Scientific Officer in the lab

10:16identified a molecule on the cell called CD 105 which then drives a gene that drives stem cells called BMP4 and it makes them more stem cell like and so as they become more stem cell like they become resistant to the drugs that are used to treat it. We've developed an antibody that targets the CD 105 and so as we do that they become less stem cell like and they lose that ability to withstand the drugs that are being used to treat it and so the cancer that was now resistant to the drugs are susceptible to them again once we use our drugs so our drug doesn't work in and of itself but it makes other drugs that are being used to treat it start working again. When patients develop cancer they you know by using our drug we can make their drugs work much longer and what we're hoping to do is make cancer like a chronic disease like HIV that patients can live with for years on end whereas HIV used to be a death sentence within months now patients are living full

11:20and normal lives for years on end and if we can make cancer into a chronic problem like that that patients can have a good quality of life with then what's the next best thing to cure? Yeah it's amazing I loved the way that you the way you position that right? This is a big mission you're tackling something huge here I'm curious from let's just say some of the kind of say I obviously get the grand vision but what does the next year look like? What are some of the things that you're focused on to kind of make this more down to earth for me at least to wrap my head around this? Yeah so by next year we want to finish our phase two trial and prostate cancer this is being run at three centers the Cedar Sinai medical centers city of hope and the University of Utah we think we'll add at least another center to that to increase enrollment and finish our phase one trial lung cancer in the meantime in the next quarter we have inter-rob efficacy data coming out both on our phase two trial and prostate cancer and our phase one trial and lung cancer be looking out for that we recently announced the strategic collaboration with bare pharmaceuticals

12:25to look at the use of their drug called Zofigo which is a radium agent that targets bone metastel with our ENV 105 to see if it makes their drug work more efficiently and with those results we're planning a phase two trial to look at the combination in patients with metastatic prostate cancer so we think this upcoming year will be a transformational one for the company we are working on a strategic partnership that we hope to announce and that we think will be transformational not only for the company but for cancer therapy in general speaking of announcements and then you got a big media feature coming up to I don't know if I say it's bigger than coming up mission matters John I've heard of this other company what's coming up for you oh so we'll be featured in CNBC they highlight certain microcaps companies and we're the one being highlighted this week if you miss that it should be available on their YouTube site and we'll have it up on our website as well

13:27yeah that's wonderful and congratulations like congratulations seriously this stuff is not easy to do and I'm a big fan of intelligent individuals like yourself and everyone else helping and really focusing in on things that are going to help a lot of lives so I love this story that being said John if somebody I know you're publicly traded company if somebody wants to learn more about kairos pharma or follow any of your work really like how do they do that? Sure so we're on the NYSE American our call letters are K-A-P-A Kappa and you can find more information about us at kairos pharma.com that's K-A-I-R-O-S pharma that's PH-A-R-M-A all in one word.com and we'll have a lot of information for investors and potential investors and we have a little cartoon explaining how our drug works as well as the pipeline of drugs that are on the docket for little trials amazing and for everybody listening just so you know we'll definitely put some links in the show notes so you can click on the links head right on over and speaking of the audience if this is your first time with mission matters and

14:31you haven't done it yet hit that subscribe or follow button this is a daily show you heard me correct each and every day we're bringing you new content new ideas and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way in your journey as well so hit that subscribe or follow button and John been an absolute pleasure thanks god for coming on Adam was great talking with you again thank you for the invitation