Durham biotech startup believes its experimental treatment could fight off COVID-19
KNOW Bio, a biotechnology startup in Research Triangle Park, has joined the raft of companies around the world trying to see if their existing technology might have some effect in the fight against the coronavirus.
The startup, led by Cree cofounder Neal Hunter, says that it has shown, in cell trials, that a nitric oxide solution can effectively stop SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, from replicating.
Nitric oxide is a molecule that the human body makes on its own. While it is a gas, it is not nitrous oxide, which is often referred to as laughing gas. Nitric oxide can be used to regulate blood flow, and some hospitals, like Massachusetts General Hospital, are testing whether it can help COVID-19 patients breathe more easily.
KNOW Bio’s experiment, which is using technology from UNC researcher Mark Schoenfisch’s lab, is trying to determine if it can be used as an antiviral as well.
The company’s cell experiments, which were conducted by an independent lab, sought to learn if the compound can slow viral RNA production and stop the spread of infection from cell to cell.
In a paper that KNOW Bio plans to submit for peer review, the company says it found that doses of nitric oxide reduced SARS-CoV-2 in cells by 99.9% after 24 hours compared to untreated cells. Importantly, Hunter said, the results showed that the treatment didn’t damage healthy cells.
Though it could certainly help KNOW Bio financially, Hunter said the company felt a moral responsibility to see if its nitric oxide technology could have an impact on the global pandemic.
“We knew we could do something against the virus,” Hunter said in an interview with The News & Observer. “We almost felt like we had a responsibility to make it happen, and now we have proven we can. It increases value from the business side, too, but people are dying every day.”
The treatment still has a long way to go before it is scientifically proven to be safe and effective. The company needs to test its experimental treatment in animal and human trials.
That could ordinarily take years, but Hunter said the company is hoping that the research paper leads to a designation from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration that could expedite development.
The company plans to seek a public-private partnership with the U.S. government — or agencies in other nations — to land funding for more studies.
KNOW Bio is a spinout of another nitric-oxide focused Triangle company called Novan, and it has around 30 employees in the Triangle.
Last year, SAS cofounder Jim Goodnight’s investment arm, Reedy Creek Investments, injected $30 million into KNOW Bio. Hunter said that funding has given the company a runway to develop its pipeline of therapeutic treatments.
In addition to its COVID-19 research, the company is also developing potential treatments for cystic fibrosis patients.
When asked whether KNOW Bio was getting into the COVID-19 treatment game late, given that there are multiple vaccine and treatment candidates at more advanced stages, Hunter said it will be important to have many different options to combat the pandemic.
If people are hesitant to get one of the potential COVID-19 vaccines, he noted, it could take longer for the general population to develop immunity against the virus.
KNOW Bio is also thinking beyond COVID-19. Hunter said nitric oxide could potentially be effective against a variety of respiratory infections, whether that is the next coronavirus, the flu or pneumonia.
“Pneumonia is probably the biggest killer for the geriatric population … (and) there are 8 billion people in the world, and all of those people are at risk for infection,” Hunter said of the potential market for nitric oxide treatments.
The company’s technology is built around decades of research from UNC professor Schoenfisch. Schoenfisch was named UNC’s inventor of the year in 2018 for his work with nitric oxide, finding new delivery methods and usages for the molecule.
One of the goals of his research is to determine whether nitric oxide might become an alternative to antibiotics, which have faced challenges from illnesses becoming resistant to them.
Robert Kacmarek, director of respiratory care at Massachusetts General Hospital, told Boston radio station WBUR earlier this year that there was some anecdotal evidence that nitric oxide helped patients suffering from the 2003 SARS epidemic, which was also caused by a coronavirus.
“At the time they used it they weren’t sure exactly why it was beneficial. But since then there’s been a lot of bench laboratory studies looking at its effect on viruses, bacteria, etc.,” Kacmarek said.
“That’s the reason we’re doing these studies, because we believe that the combined effect of improving oxygenation — because all of these patients have oxygenation problems — and the potential antiviral effect of the drug may change the course of the disease in an individual.”
Schoenfisch said the literature from the SARS era had led to some initial excitement, but no one had yet made a connection between nitric oxide and COVID-19. “That became a focus for us, and we are extremely excited that we did it,” he said in an interview.
This story was produced with financial support from a coalition of partners led by Innovate Raleigh as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work. Learn more; go to bit.ly/newsinnovate
