Market Opportunity

Cancer is the second largest cause of death in most developed nations.  It is estimated that in the United States there will be 1.52 million new cancer cases diagnosed and 560,000 deaths.  The incident rate of cancer in the European Union was 2.4 million while the mortality rate was 1.23 million.  Despite advances in cancer research and approval of new therapies each year, the average five-year relative survival rate of patients with non-cutaneous cancers has only improved from 50% in 1974-76 to 66% in 1999-2006.  In addition, conventional therapies continue to negatively impact the patient’s quality of life as surgery affects appearance and organ function, and radiation and chemotherapy cause significant side effects based on the non-selective cytotoxic effects on normal tissues.  This is truly an area with notable unmet medical needs.  In the United States the costs of cancer, including mortality, morbidity and direct medical costs, exceeded $228 billion in 2008: approximately $93 billion for direct medical costs (total of all health expenditures), at least $19 billion for indirect morbidity costs (cost of lost productivity due to illness), and over $116 billion for indirect mortality costs.

 

While there can be no single panacea for cancer treatment, there is a valuable opportunity for a minimally invasive treatment using new technology to enhance the effectiveness and safety of therapeutic drugs targeting cancer.  To date no new treatment methods have produced these desired outcomes.  Thus, there are significant opportunities to provide clinical benefits and diminish the detrimental cosmetic and functional impacts of surgery and radiation and the general side effects of chemotherapy.  Furthermore, there is motivation by budget-constrained healthcare providers to embrace lower cost oncology solutions.  Electrochemoporation therapy can deliver these benefits for many oncology indications, and has significant potential to be adopted initially as an adjuvant or secondary treatment, and ultimately as a new primary treatment method.

 

The OncoSec Medical System is highly effective in treating solid tumors, with the unique and important advantage of preserving surrounding healthy cells and tissue.  The OncoSec Medical System therapy can be applied to a wider margin around a tumor, increasing the probability of killing outlying cancer cells that may reside in the margin but without a detrimental cosmetic or functional impact, making this therapy suitable for addressing a host of cancer types and locations.  While the OncoSec Medical System is potentially applicable to all solid tumor types, we are initially targeting indications such as head & neck and cutaneous skin cancers where the OMS is particularly well suited for efficacy, safety and cost effectiveness. 

 

The OncoSec Medical System is still in development but has already shown remarkable promise in numerous clinical trials in a variety of different solid tumor types.  Evidence to date suggests that the OncoSec Medical System’s selective, localized application and its efficacy, safety, and low cost strongly position the solution to quickly become an important new treatment modality in oncology.