The Next Frontier
Boston in the Fall
One of the joys of small specialist meetings is you can find early data from emerging biotechs or largely hidden abstracts from established companies seeking to avoid too much attention.
In great years, the AACR-NCI-EORTC molecular targets meeting doesn’t disappoint, offering unique insights on gems from the poster halls.
This meeting is also where we first cut our teeth reporting on promising targeted therapies before they became mainstream in 2009 and as such, I still have a soft spot for TARGETS or TRIPLE (when in the US) or EORTC (when in Europe).
The two things I was excited enough to write about that year were Dr Anirban Maitra’s fascinating nanobots as a stealth trojan horse strategy in pancreatic cancer (he was then an assistant professor at MGH) and Dr Mark O’Connor (KuDos) thoughtfully explaining synthetic lethality and PARP inhibition in the drafty poster halls using a three-legged stool analogy… you never forget either concept once you grasp them.
Who knew a little known small molecule then subsequently would go on to become a blockbuster for AstraZeneca as olaparib (Lynparza) and appear in multiple plenary sessions?!
This is ultimately why we love this meeting – who’s the next KuDos-in-waiting and what are the cool next generation developments, which could potentially be disruptive in their field?
In today’s post, we highlight another small, young biotech very much like KuDos were in 2009, only here we are looking at a very different approach to tackling KRAS, NRAS, and BRAF.
How far they will eventually go remains to be determined, but part of the excitement lies in finding engaging scientists who seek to do things differently from everyone else and win in the long run…
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