VECTUS BIOSYSTEMS LTD (ASX:VBS) - A Drug That May Reverse Lung Scarring

Now, Tara, you formally stepped into the CEO and CTO role in May after working with Vectus as a consultant since August of last year.

What did you see in the company that made you want to lead it? And what has changed in how Vectus operates since you took the helm?

Yeah, thanks for that question, Andrew.

So when I came on, I originally came in to help the company organise some of the data for a licensing deal that they were doing with a small Canadian biotech company.

So I helped organise and actually analyse some of that raw data to get the data room built so that the other company could take a look and send their scientists in to do the due diligence.

And just like me, they saw, you know, the potential that the company had and how strong the data was.

So for me, I saw it not just with that drug that the Canadian company licensed out, but also for a number of the drugs that Vectors has in their portfolio.

And I really didn't like to see the drugs being licensed out at such an early stage.

I really felt like the potential was so great that it would be better off for the company and the incumbent shareholders to be able to put a by pushing them through the pipeline or the development pipeline a bit further along before letting them go to other companies.

For me, the data was really, really strong and I was lucky in that I got to go right back and have a look at that raw data.

I was looking at slides of the animal's organs that had had fibrosis and then been treated with the drugs.

So it was as close as you could get to the actual animal work that I could have.

And then the other thing is that not only that, but the company had already put the lead asset that I'm sure we're going to talk about in a moment through its GLP tox studies.

And they were complete from way to go.

Every single required toxicology study had been done.

The tox data and the pharmacology data looked really strong.

And so I said to the guys on the board who had asked me, you know, after we executed that deal, If I'd like to come in, I said to them, you know, with pleasure, but we really need to do a bit of a pivot because even though the drug's been doing so well up until the early clinical studies, diseases that they were looking at are such big diseases.

And I said to them that a company of this size, given that you have such nice data in animal models of lung fibrosis, the company should be going after an idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis disease, or IPF, because it is, in my opinion, and the opinion of many KOLs that I speak to, an unmet need in that whilst there are a couple of drugs that are approved and on the market for IPF, these drugs are aimed at slowing the progression of the fibrosis in the lungs in this disease.

And We had this data in animals that suggested that our drug actually reverses the fibrosis.

And so by doing that, we get sort of access to what we see as an rare disease.

So a small number of patients, less than 200,000 in the US.

And that provides companies, if the FDA agree with you, that is, that provides companies with a little bit of handholding.

So they give you a little bit of help to get through those early clinical development milestones.

And so, you know, I got the board to sort of agree with me and we've started to pivot into that direction.