President’s Message #5

October 7, 2008

We continued to focus on our TTX development program during the third quarter of 2008. Our clinical team worked hard over the summer months to sign up more clinical sites and enroll more patients in our TEC-006 trial. In parallel, we have made progress on our other R&D and business development projects.

In September, we strengthened our clinical team with the appointment of Dr. Larry Gontovnick as Senior Director, Clinical Development. A pharmacologist by training, Dr. Gontovnick brings to WEX over 20 years of experience in drug development in the pharmaceutical industry, having held senior management positions with both pharmaceutical and biotech companies. With the addition of Dr. Gontovnick, we are now in a position to develop and implement a plan for our next clinical trial, allowing us to leverage our TTX platform to expand our clinical program to target a wider range of pains and broader markets.

We have chosen chemotherapy-induced neuropathic pain as the target indication for our next proof-of-concept trial for TTX. Chemotherapy-induced neuropathic pain is an area of unmet medical need and the condition seriously impacts day-to-day functioning. A majority of patients treated with two widely-used classes of chemotherapy – the platinums (such as carboplatin and oxaliplatin) and the taxanes (such as paclitaxel and docetaxel) – experience neuropathic pain that can be debilitating and/or dose-limiting for chemotherapy treatment. We have confidence in the potential of TTX to treat neuropathic pain based on our results from preclinical studies in relevant disease models as well as observations from our Phase IIb trial, WEX-014 (as published in the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management, April 2008).

As we move our clinical programs forward, we have also started preparing for partnership discussions. Part of our business strategy is to seek out strategic alliances with established pharmaceutical firms with a view to attracting financial participation for the later stages of clinical development and regulatory approval, and to access partners’ marketing and sales capabilities. Toward this end, we have implemented a plan to attend key investment and partnering conferences in the biotech and pharmaceutical industry to introduce WEX to potential partners. We presented at BioContact in early October, and later this month we will be attending BioPartnering Europe, a premier international partnering conference, where a number of one-on-one meetings have already been scheduled.

On another front, following our decision to exit the generic business, as stated in our last financial report, we have wound down our generic drug business in China and are now using our facility there solely for production of TTX.

As always, I thank our team at WEX and our collaborators for another productive quarter, and thank our shareholders for their continued confidence and support.
 

Sincerely yours,

Bin Huang, PhD, MBA
President and CEO