2+2=5 I'm just going to get very speculative on that discussion yesterday about the Swede's research into the role of sortilin in cancer and what Theratech might or might not be able the achieve.
Here is another paper by the Swede's on the role of sortilin.
https://breast-cancer-research.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13058-018-1060-5
It's hard science but I'll give my version of an overview (likely incorrect). What they talk about is dedifferentiation and EMT (which I believe are the same thing) and how progranulin/sortilin stimulate this process to produce cancer cells that can metastasize and infiltrate, spreading the cancer cells to other parts of the body.
Here is out guy in UQAM accepting $1.5 in tax payers money for Theratech's research, thanks the people of Quebec.
https://cqdm.org/en/projet-finance/borhane-annabipre-clinical-design-of-a-novel-targeted-and-personalized-treatment-against-sortilin-positive-triple-negative-breast-cancers/
Here is some work he did recently in his role as an academic at UQAM into another anti-cancer molecule. It's just the abstract but it talks about a lot of the things the Swede's talk about, looking for markers of EMT, it even mentions VM.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01635581.2020.1733624
So what this tells me is he's already interested in these processes the Swedes are looking at with other anti-cancer molecules and is set up to do the work.
This is the point 2+2=5 comes in.
We know he's partly gone down this road with TH-1902 by doing the VM work. Why wouldn't he apply the techniques he's employed to study other anti-cancer molecules to TH-1902? Why wouldn't he try to see if TH-1902 inhibits Sortilin in the way the Swede show if he already has the know-how and capabilities in his lab? It's hard for me to imagine they would simple stop at this point having done the VM work and not dive that little bit deeper into the MOA when we can see they have the capability to do it.
A little bit more 2+2=5.
The very early Fasttrack must be supported by something. It might be that what we already know like the challenging indications or VM MOA got them the early nod from the FDA. It could be there is something meaningful coming out of AACR that supports a fasttrack designation. The PR from Dec suggests it's just the same work in TNBC done in other indications but could it be more than that? If it's not AACR then I still believe they should be working on more MOA stuff, if there is something to uncover then maybe we'll eventually hear.