Biotech Strategy Blog

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

Posts tagged ‘MK-7684’

Hubble Space Telescope, Spitzer Space Telescope

Hubble Space Telescope, Spitzer Space Telescope – Image credit: NASA/ESA/P. Jeffries

With the latest Nobel Prize in Physics being awarded to three scientists (Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel, and Andrea Ghez) for their work on black holes in the galaxy, it occurred to me there are some handy analogies for cancer research and development too.

As NASA aptly put it:

“Every second a star somewhere out in the universe explodes as a supernova. But some extremely massive stars go out with a whimper instead of a bang. When they do, they can collapse under the crushing tug of gravity and vanish out of sight, only to leave behind a black hole.”

Almost every Pharma company with an oncology pipeline is faced with the same fundamental challenge at some point in its life cycle – which ones are the rising stars that could explode as a blockbuster versus which compounds are doomed to vanish and be sucked back into the black hole (aka the screening library)?

Can we always tell from the basis of what are usually relatively simple allcomer trials in phase 1 with dose escalation in advanced solid tumours?

It’s fairly straightforward to tell when something is too toxic for patients to tolerate, as the number of grade 3+ serious events will quickly indicate, but activity isn’t so easy to determine.  This begs an important question to be answered – what are researchers and new product professionals actually looking for and how do they interpret the data?  Are they looking from a similar lens or are there differences in perception, much as a kaleidoscope changes even with the same elements included.

Here we take an in-depth look at a couple of early compounds against targets, which have garnered some attention this year and explore reactions from both sponsor and KOL angles.  As anyone involved in clinical trials knows, not everyone sings from the same hymn sheet every time!

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Remember the good old days at ESMO17 in Madrid? Sadly there’s no face to face networking at this year’s ESMO20 virtual meeting!

In this third ESMO 2020 Preview the focus is on early stage immunotherapies – we’ll cover targeted therapies in a separate review article.

As new regimens evolve involving multiple immune targets, this complexity brings with it a greater need to understand cell-cell interactions – not just immune cell relationships, but also oncogenic, metabolic, and even epigenetic ones. How do they all fit together and what happens when we interfere with those relationships therapeutically?

Often the simple answer is we don’t know until we head into the clinic, I’m afraid.

Beyond the obvious phase 3 IO readouts in the various Presidential symposia and Proffered oral sessions there are quite a few emerging ideas – old ones with a twist as well as entirely new ones – which we can consider and discuss.

Here, we highlight five key IO areas related to cancer immunotherapy and explore the various concepts as preparation for the upcoming meeting…

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Time for some additional colour commentary!

There has been some incredibly intense interest surrounding TIGIT as a new therapeutic target in oncology of late, to the point where some observers have been wildly claiming this is the new universal checkpoint everyone has been waiting for.

But is it?

It’s early days yet with little data presented from people with cancer, so at this point it could well be a bit of a stretch to find another anti-PD–1/PD-L1 equivalent, but this doesn’t mean there isn’t utility in seeing clinical activity in some tumour types, far from it.

In our latest post, we take a look at what’s coming up in the TIGIT niche, along with an interview from a company active in this niche.

What do the company have to say and how do they see this panning out?

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