Sorrento Therapeutics arguably has the most diverse set of products for the COVID-19 pandemic. In this video from Motley Fool Live recorded on Nov. 12, executives from the company talk about a few of the biotech’s preclinical products. Salicyn 30 is an antiviral that blocks infection of cells by the novel coronavirus. COVIDTRAP is an ACE2 receptor decoy, which could bind up the coronavirus and keep it from infecting cells. And STI 8282 is a stem cell product designed to help patients recover from lung damage.
Brian Orelli: You’ve got a couple of other treatments that you’re working on. There is an antiviral treatment that’s in pre-clinical development called Salicyn 30. Can you explain how it inhibits the virus and then what’s your timeframe for that to go into the clinic?
Henry Ji: A small-molecule, we synthesize a good quantity and we have some of the early PK data of this one, is systematically available. Now, we are formulating it. That is a potentially oral pill and we’re doing the planning for PK study, then do a viral challenge study. If we do viral challenges study, if that works, then we should be able to get into a talk study and get into potentially human testing. Now, the mechanism, the action of this small molecule is totally different from all of the other small molecule. This is relating to memory potentiating working on a host cells. If you can change the memory potentiation, it blocks the virus entry into the cell. That tells you it could be a broad spectrum potentially. One of the component […] plasmid in the similar type of class, they’re already in human testing. It’s test as a broad spectrum against the coronavirus, potentially other viruses. So our component is more potent than the […] and we believe this compound, if everything goes well, could be a broad spectrum for pan-coronavirus. That gives you potentially any type of the coronavirus and even the mutant emerging, that small molecule may still work. It’s not a protease, not an RNA reverse transcriptase inhibitor.
