Some years ago, at a scientific investors’ meeting in Belgium, I had the good fortune to meet an individual whom I would describe as an impressive business woman, scientist and drug hunter. She specialized in sleuthing new and unique compounds hidden in plants from one of the oldest and most diverse rainforests in the world.
It is no accident that Dr. Victoria Gordon, CEO of Qbiotics, Ltd.;Dr. Paul Reddell, cofounder of Ecobiotics, Ltd.; and chief scientist Dr. Peter Parsons are discovering important new compounds across a range of disease areas utilizing their uniquely-designed system of rainforest drug discovery.
Unlike many rainforest drug hunters who visit rainforests periodically, Dr. Gordon’s company is permanently situated in a facility near the rainforest in Yungaburra, Queensland, Australia. As a result of their proximity to the rainforest, Dr. Gordon and her team can frequently make observations and do experiments that lead to discovery.
At our initial meeting, Dr. Gordon’s investment presentation of Ecobiotics’ drug discovery technology was thought-provoking, but I was most impressed by the fruit of its application. In particular, a compound Dr. Gordon’s team found with anticancer properties impressed me. In the presentation, Dr. Gordon showed before-and-after photographs of several non-controlled experiments but with a clear effect; tumors in some cases as large as an orange in a number of animals species, after injected with the compound from a plant, appeared to melt away.
The compound, now named EBC-46, was discovered when a small marsupial in the forest was eating the fruit berry of a plant called Fontainea picrosperma. Afterwards, it became distressed and had to spit out the berry. This reaction was most likely due to a burning sensation experienced as a result of an inflammation caused by the berry of the Fontainea plant.
These types of observations have led Dr. Gordon’s team to isolate plants that exhibit characteristics of interest, such as described above, and take them into the laboratory for more extensive analysis for potential pharmaceutical applications. A recent article about cancer drugs by The Scripps Institute, Why Natural Products? states that:
“Natural products remain the best sources of drugs and drug leads, and this remains true today despite the fact that many pharmaceutical companies have deemphasized natural products research in favor of HTP screening of combinatorial libraries during the past 2 decades. From 1940s to date, 131 (74.8%) out of 175 small molecule anticancer drugs are natural product-based/inspired, with 85 (48.6%) being either natural products or derived therefrom. From 1981 to date, 79 (80%) out of 99 small molecule anticancer drugs are natural product-based/inspired, with 53 (53%) being either natural products or derived therefrom. Among the 20 approved small molecule New Chemical Entities (NCEs) in 2010, a half of them are natural products.”
As a result of years of investigation, Dr. Gordon’s team isolated a unique compound named EBC-46 from the berry spit out by the marsupial. It is patented as a new chemical entity, and the company has started clinical development. Today, the drug candidate EBC-46 has been spun out of the parent company Ecobiotics into a private drug development company called Qbiotics. EBC-46 is in clinical trials, phase II, for veterinary indications in dogs, and has started safety studies in humans. According to Dr. Gordon, once injected into the center of the tumor, EBC-46 shows a remarkable ability to elicit an immune response. As a result of the injection, the area swells and reddens as the tumor cells begin to die off, turning a purple color and than black like a big bruise. Within a month, the tumor is ablated and the tissue around the dead cells begins to heal like a wound.
Dr. Parsons believes that this tumor ablation is due to hemorrhagic necrosis of the tumor, as the compound EBC-46 destroys the more fragile capillaries that feed the tumor. In other words, the tumor cells are starved of blood supply. The immune response that follows helps clean out the necropsied tissue and initiates a healing process.
Although much of the clinical results for EBC-46 up to date has been anecdotal these results look very promising. If the ongoing clinical trials come close to the uncontrolled data results EBC-46 could become a very important tool in our arsenal of treatments against cancer. Another natural product of note is a topical drug called "Picato" marketed by Leo Pharma with a very good safety and efficacy record for the treatment of actinic kerotosis a precancerous condition of the skin. Picato or Ingenol mebutate seems of have a very similar mechanism of action to EBC-46 and in my opinion serves as a good proof of concept for EBC-46. Qbiotics has applied its drug candidate EBC-46 in a more aggressive way by injecting it into solid tumors where Leo Pharma markets a topical application of Picato. Ingenol mebutate is also a natural product derived from a plant called Euphorbia Peplus.
While the science and mechanism of this immune response it not fully understood Dr. Parsons and Dr. Boyle have published in Plos One, October 2014 | Volume 9 | Issue 10 | e108887 a study entitled “Intra-Lesional Injection of the Novel PKC Activator EBC- 46 Rapidly Ablates Tumors in Mouse Models”. In this study, they found that EBC-46 in mice most likely worked through the modulation of the Protein Kinase C complex. As stated in their publication, their results demonstrated that “a single intra-lesional injection of EBC-46 causes PKC-dependent hemorrhagic necrosis, rapid tumor cell death and ultimate cure of solid tumors in pre-clinical models of cancer.”
In conversations with Dr. Gordon, I learned that many millions of years of evolution has produced a complex diversity of plant compounds that instruct and regulate the multifaceted interaction of plants and animals in the rainforest, mimicking an organism. The type of complex structures designed by nature to achieve the above over millions of years would probably take an infinitely large number of organic scientists years to reproduce in the laboratory. Has nature produced these compounds just waiting in the rainforests for us to discover them?
* In 2009-2010 I was a consultant to Ecobiotics, Ltd and Qbiotics, Ltd. Currently I have no financial relationship or ownership in either company.
