Colorado Firm Sees Opportunity in Trump’s Criticized UV Idea

(Bloomberg) -- When President Donald Trump suggested on Thursday that injecting disinfectant or ultraviolet light into the body could be a way to kill the coronavirus, his comments were widely criticized as harmful.

But for one U.S. company, the president’s remarks have been a marketing opportunity and a lesson in modern-day politics. The company’s chief executive officer maintains his company has been muzzled in recent days by social media companies.

A few days before Trump’s speech, Aytu BioScience, based in Englewood, Colorado, began promoting an ultraviolet technology that it claims can be inserted via a catheter into the throat, emitting ultraviolet rays inside the body through a LED light.

In a promotional video, the company said that it had “proven in the lab” that the weakest kind of ultraviolet light, UVA, was -- at the right wattage and duration -- “still effective at killing a variety of viruses and bacteria -- including the coronavirus.” The video showed an illustration of a system it called Healight blasting lungs with ultraviolet rays.

The company’s video was quickly picked up by Trump’s supporters on social media, where it was viewed and shared hundreds of thousands of times. On Friday, Fox Business Network host Lou Dobbs devoted a segment of his show to the technology. Meanwhile, on Twitter, Aytu began tagging journalists and prominent supporters of the president.

“We realize @realDonaldTrump comments about UV light as a potential treatment for Covid-19 may seem like they came from left field. They didn’t. Peer reviewed data to be published soon” the company tweeted.

Aytu BioScience’s shares declined 8.4% to $1.85 just before 1 p.m. Tuesday in New York.

On Saturday, Google’s YouTube deleted Aytu BioScience’s video promoting the ultraviolet technology, and one of the company’s accounts was also removed from Twitter. A YouTube spokesperson said the video was removed because it promoted unsubstantiated medical treatments for the coronavirus.

A Twitter representative said the Aytu account was mistakenly caught in a spam filter and that it has since been reinstated.

Josh Disbrow, the company’s chief executive officer, criticized the social media companies for censorship.

“These days, politics seems to dictate that if one party says, ‘The sky is blue,’ the other party is obligated to reply, ‘No, it’s not and you’re a terrible human being for thinking that,’” Disbrow wrote, in a Monday column in the Wall Street Journal. “That leaves no room for science, in which the data speak for themselves, regardless of ideology and only when they’re ready.”

Several medical experts raised doubts about the treatment and suggested it could be dangerous.

“I would describe this as quack medicine,” said Richard Parsons, senior lecturer in biochemical toxicology at King’s College London. “UVA light is thought to be responsible for the majority of skin cancers that get diagnosed. Shoving a tube with UVA light down somebody’s throat is more likely to cause damage to the cells in the lungs than to kill the coronavirus.”

Crispin Halsall, an environmental chemist and professor at Lancaster University in the U.K., said that the coronavirus hides itself within cells of the body’s respiratory membrane, and may also be present in other bodily fluids, which would make it difficult for ultraviolet light to eliminate it from the body.

In laboratories, Halsall said, it is common to use UV light to sterilize surfaces. But inside the body, “you are going to do more harm than good,” Halsall said.

“This treatment sounds like snake oil to me,” Halsall said. “To insert light inside the body, orally or through the skin, is likely to cause serious damage to blood cells, muscle tissue, organ tissue and DNA.”

Aytu BioScience, which describes itself as “a specialty pharmaceutical company focused on commercializing novel products,” didn’t respond to requests for comment. The company licensed the Healight technology from Cedars-Sinai, a nonprofit academic health-care organization in Los Angeles.

Aytu and Cedars-Sinai “have engaged with the Food and Drug Administration to pursue a rapid path to human use,” Disbrow wrote in his newspaper column.

“Hardly anyone noticed -- until Thursday when President Trump mused, “...supposedly you brought the light inside the body...” he wrote.

A FDA representative declined to comment.

Cedars-Sinai said in a statement that the technology had “not been tested or used on patients” and that it was working with Aytu with the “aim of potentially enabling near-term use as a Covid-19 intervention for critically ill, intubated patients.”

On April 17, Block & Leviton LLP, a national securities litigation firm, said it was investigating Aytu for potential securities fraud. The investigation, the firm said, was in relation to news reports linking the company to the provision of unapproved Covid-19 tests to public health departments in Colorado and California, which had resulted in Atyu’s stock soaring 322%.

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