Jennerex, Inc. (San Francisco, CA and Ottawa, Canada) a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company, announced that the journal, Nature Reviews Cancer, has published an article about the company's promising, targeted and armed oncolytic poxviruses, which have demonstrated encouraging clinical and preclinical data. The article, published in the January 2009 issue, was authored by David H. Kirn, M.D., president and chief executive officer of Jennerex and Visiting Professor, Department of Clinical Pharmacology, University of Oxford, and Steve H. Thorne, Assistant Professor at the Departments of Surgery and Immunology at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute.

"We are honored that Nature Reviews Cancer considers oncolytic poxviruses to be such an important emerging field as to devote a full Perspectives Opinion to reviewing major recent advances. We are excited by the data that investigators have reported to date with our first-in-class cancer therapeutics. The lead product in this class, JX-594, is currently in Phase 2 testing for liver cancer and colorectal cancer. The Phase 1 intra-tumoral trial of JX-594 demonstrated objective tumor destruction in most patients, with multiple types of cancer, and we are now also studying systemic delivery of JX-594 in the clinic," stated Dr. Kirn. "Our next product from this class, JX-929, is now being evaluated in a Phase 1 clinical trial."

The article reviewed the evolution of the field of oncolytic viral therapy…