CellCeutix pharmaceutical company

Because cancer is a pain in the neck

Few words have the immediately mind-numbing, life-altering effect that "cancer" does. Few diseases have cancer's indiscriminant, murderous streak. And few prospects are more daunting than trying to find an answer that works and safely. Most large pharmaceutical companies use high throughput screening, a scattershot approach that involves testing thousands of potential answers against a particular target, and rational drug design, which puts large teams of scientists and powerful computers at work on the problem.

Dr. Krishna Menon, one of the founders of Cellceutix and its Chief Scientific Officer, didn't have the luxury of being able to throw compounds at the cancer wall and to see which would stick, nor did he have teams of researchers to do the thinking for him. What he did have, however, was 35 years of governmental, academic, and pharmaceutical industry experience, including leading the development of two "BLOCKBUSTER" drugs. He also had access to a very valuable bull.

Prior to obtaining his degrees in medicine and pharmacology, Dr. Menon was trained as a veterinarian. The story behind Kevetrin dates back to this early experience, when he was working for the government of Jamaica as the chief veterinarian of a Parish. Dr. Menon watched as this prized bull was mistakenly sprayed with a cytotoxic agent to kill ticks. Unfortunately the animal was killed, but subsequent examination also showed that there were some cancers present under the bull's skin which had also been eliminated. This gave rise to the thought in Dr. Menon's mind that there had to be a way to develop cytotoxic agents that eliminated cancer cells while minimizing toxicity.

Fast forward 15 years... Dr. Menon was working with certain types of compounds called indoles, which appeared to have modest anti-cancer activity and to be relatively safe for humans. He thought this might be the road to a new compound that would have the same safety profile but greater activity against cancer cells. Unfortunately, because of other projects, he was unable to start out on this road for another 10 years.

In 2003, Dr. Menon finally had the opportunity to put his experience to work. This was the beginning of several years of trial and error and more trial and error and the frustration that often attends it, as Menon hunted for a new structure that would have better efficacy than indoles but would be no less safe. He was also acutely aware of the fact that a simple derivative of an existing compound would be unlikely to be considered very innovative. He needed something really novel.

After trying many structures. Dr. Menon finally hit on Kevetrin's. He immediately tried it in some in vitro screens and found it to be quite active. Based on these 5,000-plus animal tests, Dr. Menon has determined that Kevetrin has special potential in treating head and neck cancers. He and the Cellceutix team are now working on completing the preclinical development work on Kevetrin..