We just watched a behind-the scenes docuseries on Netflix called “Countdown: Paul vs. Tyson” in which the boxer, Mike Tyson, describes himself as a “natural born killer” (NBK) and his opponent, the YouTuber Jake Paul, as a “manufactured killer” (MK).
The description immediately resonated with us because our lead oncolytic adenovirus, AdAPT-001, like Mike Tyson, is a natural-born killer having been minimally modified from native or wild-type adenovirus. However, like Jake Paul, AdAPT-001 is also a manufactured killer that has been engineered with the insertion of a transforming growth factor beta (TGFβ) trap to sequester the immune suppressive and fibrotic protein, TGFβ, and so to activate the immune system against cancer cells.
Ancient for a boxer, Mike Tyson is 58 years old. Much more ancient are adenoviruses which have been in circulation for hundreds of thousands of years. The rationale of EpicentRx CEO, Dr. Tony Reid, when he designed AdAPT-001 was to preserve as much as possible the efficient replication mechanism of adenoviruses, which produce about one million copies of themselves every 40 hours and so to make AdAPT-001 a natural-born killer (NBK).
He has largely succeeded, and so, as we countdown to the start of a randomized clinical trial between AdAPT-001 and the tumor type sarcoma our money is on the NBK/MK hybrid to score an early round KO.