Biotech Strategy Blog

Commentary on Science, Innovation & New Products with a focus on Oncology, Hematology & Immunotherapy

Posts tagged ‘Aurigene’

To simply say, “it’s complicated!” is a often bit of an understatement in cancer research.

Imagine any advanced cancer in the refractory setting might have multiple changes and defects driving oncogenic activity, which makes targeting just one or even two of them somewhat limiting in terms of the potential impact on outcomes.

Then there’s the whole separate debate of which approach to a given target is the best one – a small molecule degrader or an inhibitor or an antibody?

The best way to tackle these issues is to develop a detailed roadmap with various key landmarks identified, plus flags highlighting areas for further investigation.

Perhaps an underrated aspect of oncology research is the increasing use of chemical probes (degraders or small molecules) to explore the underlying biology in order to understand what needs to be done next in the form of resistance mechanisms or synergies, for example.

The findings generated from this research could then lead to the development of next generation pipeline agents or suggest novel combination approaches to evaluate, which may not have been obvious at first sight.

In this latest post, we take a look at various examples using protein degraders and small molecules though the lens of select patient populations, various tumour targets, and even mechanisms of resistance…

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gaylord-national-harbour-md

National Harbor, MD

Despite remarkable results with cancer immunotherapy to date, we do need to keep out feet on the ground and remember that response rates are relatively low to modest (10–30%) and the majority of patients do not respond or see a benefit with these approaches.

As we start moving beyond checkpoint monotherapy, the realisation has fast hit many researchers and companies that we really don’t know as much about the tumour microenvironment (TME) as we would like.

No doubt we will learn a lot more about it from the combinatory approaches, but be aware that this also means higher risk associated with such developments – we will likely see a lot of failures – and hopefully, some successes too.

This is where the little biotech companies have an opportunity to shine… they may have some intriguing IO compounds in development but not an anti-PD1/L1 backbone, meaning they can collaborate with a big pharma company to explore novel combinations in small phase 1/2 trials to determine what works or not. This is much lower risk (and R&D costs) for both parties and we get to see more quickly where things shake out.

At the annual Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC) meeting last week, there was a whole day devoted to New Immunotherapy Drug Development.  

Some of these agents look worthy of watching out for and following their progress.  A variety of data in different targets and MOA were presented from big and small companies alike.  We selected a few of the promising ones for further review and discussion.

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Iwakuni Bridge

Cherry Blossoms and Iwakuni Bridge

We’re continuing our countdown to the 2016 AACR annual meeting in New Orleans with a look at anti TIM-3 and LAG-3 inhibitory checkpoints and highlighting some of the companies with noteworthy abstracts.

In case you missed it, yesterday AACR announced that Vice President Biden will be delivering remarks on the final day of the meeting, Wednesday, April 20th in the “Highlights 2016: Vision for the Future” Plenary Session. As conference diehards, we will be there in person, but AACR have announced they plan to livestream it to the world. It’s a fitting finale to what is set to be a “must attend” meeting for those with an interest in cancer new product development and in particular, cancer immunotherapy.

What can we learn from AACR abstracts on TIM–3 and LAG–3?

There is some early clinical data that we will be checking out (no pun intended) on TIM-3 and LAG-3.

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