Biotech Strategy Blog

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

Posts tagged ‘KRAS’

All is not what it seems

You see a dry cleaners, I see a gelato shop in San Diego (yes, really)

Lately the cancer research space is abuzz with the promise of several novel therapeutic approaches, each touted as the next speculation akin to gold panning or tulip mania in centuries past.

As the field rapidly expands, a couple of nagging questions emerge:

  • Can the market truly support the sheer volume of agents now in development?
  • What does success in this particular niche actually look like?

The issue extends far beyond the usual breathless hype and headlines. The reality is many smaller biotechs are on a collision course with a ‘day of reckoning’, as the large pharma players inevitably shift their focus either to snapping up the cream of the crop and through their resources as clinical development or seek fresher opportunities. The unforgiving nature of this ecosystem is nothing new, of course. Yet the current scale of the current pipeline frenzy is truly staggering.

Amidst this frenetic activity, however, glimpses of genuine innovation manage to cut through the noise. The latest dataset from the AACR annual meeting provides a window into some of the more novel strategies taking shape in early stage research. While the hype around certain candidates may be getting ahead of the data, the insights reveal both the promise and potential pitfalls of this highly competitive therapeutic landscape.

As the field continues to evolve at a breakneck pace, discerning fact from fiction will be essential. Mere incremental advances will struggle to capture and hold attention for the long run and, more importantly, investment in an environment hungry for promising agents to fill aging pipelines with gaps coming up thanks to loss of exclusivity.

The thing is, it’s easy to forget only the most compelling, well-differentiated approaches will be poised to navigate this tricky terrain successfully…

To learn more from our latest oncology expert interview and get a heads up on key cancer research insights, subscribers can log-in or you can click to gain access to BSB Premium Content.

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Translating Scientific Insights into Competitive Advantage

When a precise landing is important…

One of the many challenges with discovery and preclinical presentations at a scientific congress is anyone who is not a professional drug hunter themselves can easily miss important subtleties and nuances.

To overcome this, what we sought to achieve in this latest write-up and candid expert interview was a more everyday discussion with a young up and coming biotech around several key areas:

  • The specific challenges the field has faced.
  • Why are Nested Therapeutics doing what they are doing – differently?
  • What the potential impact of their chosen strategies might be.

In this way, we aim to bring the complex science to life in a more easily understandable and digestible fashion…

To learn more from our latest oncology expert interview and get a heads up on key cancer research insights, subscribers can log-in or you can click to gain access to BSB Premium Content.

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Pointing the IO way

Pointing the way

A few years ago at SITC 2016, we wrote about a raft of early agents, which were then considered all the rage against a variety targets at the time…

  • Modulating MDSCs, M2 TAMs, Tregs
  • TLR agonists
  • Adding MEK or TIGIT to checkpoint blockade
  • Immune agonists from 4-1BB to VISTA
  • And so on…

While some of the trials are still ongoing, a few have fallen by the wayside and still other targets continue to receive sporadic attention.

This year’s crop of emerging agents and targets are a very different bunch altogether and the breathless hype has been replaced by much more quiet determination and optimism.

What to watch out for in 2023? 

We offer eight areas to explore and check out – most of them are up and coming small to medium biotechs focused on oncology rather than big pharma cos with money to burn…

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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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What science tells us about future directions in lung cancer

The World Conference on Lung Cancers (WCLC) annual meeting in Singapore showcased important scientific findings illuminating new directions against these deadly diseases.

While some clinical presentations fell a little short of expectations, smaller sessions revealed some important gems illustrating the intricacies of lung cancer biology where art and science intersect.

In the end lung cancer remains complex, heterogeneous, often aggressive, and evolving. Emerging translational research undoubtedly brings hope towards guiding more targeted therapeutic strategies.

The art is in creatively leveraging emerging science to tackle these lethal diseases from every angle.

Here we highlight seven areas where we ought to be paying attention to when considering future directions in lung cancer…

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Take the high road

We’re at the point in time in the cancer conference calendar where we are rolling out AACR analyses and interviews while also highlighting relevant ASCO abstracts to watch out for.

As a result, I always tend to think of May as the ‘mish mash’ month, to put things in Brit speak.

This isn’t necessarily a negative connotation, by the by, rather it’s a great opportunity to highlight some developments in different niches which tended to be overlooked.

Sometimes new data allows us to put a more coherent picture together or set boundaries around the corporate messaging.

To kick start our ASCO coverage, we’ve taken five phase 1 trials and looked at the pros and cons of each in the context of the underlying science – some come out strongly or understated, others much less so.  It’s important to understand the underpinnings in order to avoid being sucked into the inevitable hype machine accompanying abstracts at this event…

BSB subscribers can read our latest post conference coverage from AACR plus commentary and analysis – you can either log-in or click to access.

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Challenges and opportunities with two different onco modalities

Paris, 2022

With the AACR annual meeting coming up next month, it seemed a good opportunity to highlight some relevant findings from another cancer conference held this week (ESMO Targeted Anticancer Therapies congress or TAT for short) as a warm-up for the bigger event since there is some handy overlap topic wise.

Having very recently been in Paris (TAT changed to a virtual only meeting), I can say it didn’t feel very spring-like at all (right), quite the opposite!

Europe continues under a cloud at the moment with the Ukraine war very much to the fore – European Lung has also been moved to a virtual event as the conference venue in Prague is quite rightly being converted into a refugee assistance centre.

Despite all the prevailing gloom, there were quite a few important nuggets of interest to share from TAT this year…

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Learning from what patients tumours are telling us

There’s gold in dem hills

Some time ago in an interview with a well regarded cancer expert, the topic of learning more from patients tumours came up, and with it some of the challenges inherent in the process, such as access to biopsy samples.

If you think about, while post mortems can tell us why an individual person’s lesions stopped responding to a particular therapy, it’s only when we have huge broad (many tumour types) and deep (primary and metastatic lesions) in datasets with a richness of data that we can truly learn about patterns and trends.

What truly drives metastases and when?  Can we determine novel and more accurate biomarkers earlier than we currently have?

There’s plenty of gold nuggets to be found in the latest genomics research…

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Doubling down on modest data

In our latest post we’re going to explore some controversial data and look at various aspects surrounding the presentation and company messaging.

We don’t always highlight positive or even negative data – often in phase 1 or 2 trials the data is limited or mixed and companies have to make difficult decisions on whether to proceed with new product development based on imperfect or incomplete information.

Let’s also not forget there’s more than one way to string a molecule together and sometimes what failed in the past can receive a new lease of life with greater selectivity, switching binding substrates, or taking a different approach to modalities, for example.

For big Pharmas, it’s much easier to put projects in an ‘on hold’ bucket while they pursue more promising opportunities, whereas for small biotechs with limited cash flow they often have no choice but to keep going with the hype machine, especially if there’s little else in the immediate pipeline…

BSB subscribers can read up on our ongoing oncology commentary and analysis – you can either log-in or click to access our latest review.

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Oncology trends and directions to watch out for in 2022

Proof that the sun came on a Wednesday in England this winter – hard not to be upbeat on days like this!!

As we continue our journey looking forward in 2022 and beyond, it’s time to start putting some meat on the bones, so to speak, in terms of what specifically we can look forward to hearing more about.

January brings a renewed sense of hope, despite the dreary weather in many places around the world, even in the Blighty the sun sometimes shines (right).

With this uplifting comes a fresh sense of new directions too, which is as true for both life in general as it is for oncology R&D.

With this in mind, in our latest review, we highlight six key areas to watch out for and explain why we are interested in following them with regards to early oncology new product development…

BSB subscribers can read up on our ongoing commentary and analysis on oncology new product development – you can either log-in or click to access the back story behind the latest innovations!

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