Lots of good stuff on the Soligenix oral mucositis drug. If I were a doctor prescribing a treatment for someone who was at risk for OM, I would be very concerned about anything that was systemic. So many times, people have thought that something was safe -- and then much later, it turns out that there are side effects that were unnoticed when the drug was approved.

Here's an example: the asthma drug Singulair has been used for decades. Within the past few years, finally some doctors noticed that some people taking it had sleep disturbances, depression, and suicidal thoughts. Oops !

So, if you were a doctor and had a choice of medication to prescribe for a truly horrible side effect like oral mucositis, would you start with a mouthwash the patient could use at home and which has very little systemic absorption, or an IV therapy that required a trip to the clinic twice a week, and had a systemic action that might affect the immune system?

Don't get me wrong -- anything that can help these people is great. Everyone doesn't respond to every drug, and it's always good to have alternatives. As I said before, it could be that certain patients might need BOTH treatments to overcome this problem (assuming that they both make it through the FDA process to approval). But there are clearly many advantages to Brilacidin-OM, again assuming it works as well in humans as it did in hamsters.