Rose Bengal (PV-10) + Oncology + Pediatrics

Updated below: 12/8/16 and 12/15/16.

Provectus issued a press release and filed an associated 8-K today regarding a collaboration (currently, an "agreement to establish a framework for collaborative pre-clinical research projects") to explore the use of Rose Bengal/PV-10 in pediatric cancer, Announces Agreement with POETIC (Pediatric Oncology Experimental Therapeutics Investigators Consortium) to Study Potential of PV-10 for Pediatric Cancer.

Image source

POETIC's website is here. POETIC co-founder Dr. Tanya Trippett, MD (Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center) attended April healthcare conference at the Vatican, where Australia's Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre's Dr. Grant McArthur discussed PV-10.

See Infantile (July 26, 2016) on the blog's Archived News VI page:

"There also is a robust library of biomedical literature experimenting on/with, describing and discussing Rose Bengal's diagnostic applications in adults, and notably in children. See, for example October 15, 2015 blog post Still Standing, or Rose Bengal in children (hepatoblastoma, radiopharmaceutical) (May 6, 2016) on the blog's Archived News V page. In medicine, children are not small adults when it comes to safety, efficacy, dosing, etc. Most of the pediatric literature related to Rose Bengal refers to the API as liver function diagnostic 131I-Rose Bengal. From a safety and PK perspective, it is interesting, available for review, and dates back to at least the 1960s."

See also October 15, 2015 blog post Still Standing:

"Rose Bengal’s medical properties have been established in the clinic, adults and children[5], and the literature, as well as with the FDA. The compound was noted as a stain for visualizing corneal ulcers in 1919[6] and a marker for impaired liver function in 1923[7]. Currently there are more than 3,800 Rose Bengal references in the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central database.[8] The compound has [non-therapeutic] FDA safety profiles as an intravenous hepatic diagnostic called Robengatope® and a topical ophthalmic diagnostic called Rosettes® or Minims®."

Updated (12/8/16).1: Additional Information & Takeaways

• I'm led to believe MSKCC (Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center) [on the pediatric oncology side] began using reagent grade Rose Bengal (i.e., drug substance, or the active pharmaceutical ingredient [API] in PV-10; e.g., available from Sigma-Aldrich) -- presumably in in vitro models -- in the spring (following the above mentioned Vatican healthcare conference). Apparently, PV-10 (i.e., pharmaceutical grade drug product) was shipped to MSKCC and other POETIC partners (specifically, I would imagine to Alberta Children's Hospital, which will lead the pre-clinical development of another POETIC collaboration; see CorMedix below).

• I imagine one of Dr. Trippett and others' pediatric oncology focus areas may be sarcomas, which are tumors that occur in the bones and soft tissues.

• I also imagine POETIC and others' treatment approach to pediatric cancer patients may mirror the approach being taken with adult cancer patients in the current"age," "era" or time of immuno-oncology; that is, combination of PV-10 with checkpoint inhibition.

• See also CorMedix's collaboration with POETIC -- the parties' press release from September 2016, and Grammatical error (September 21, 2016) on the blog's Archived News VI page.

Updated (12/15/16).2: "Copyright infringement?" Yuck, yuck...

Click to enlarge. Tweet image source

Provectus' attendance link is here: