RE:RE:RE:QuestionKudos must be given to Christian Marsolais here. He is the remaining scientific guy in the company and he had background in cancer before joining Thera. Also, Dr. Beliveau is a mediatic "star" among top scientist in the province of Quebec. So everybody knows him. Also, his former students are a bit everywhere in the bioscience microcosme of the province. I also think that some former lab people that lost their jobs at Thera when they closed the labs 10 years ago ended up at UQAM.
As I said yesterday noting that John Huss was with Angiochem, it's a small world in Montreal in biosciences. In every biopharma company, there is somebody that knows somebody from another company and there are former UQAM students everywhere. But to me, the history of Thera with peptide drugs candidates is the key that led them to buy Katana, and to Katana selling to Thera. It was part of their field of expertise as a drug developper. I think it was a natural outcome. There was a company with a very innovative peptide drug candidate, and a company with expertise in developping peptide drug candidates, and there was Marsolais with the oncology background to be able to figure the whole thing out and see that there was a good fit there. Add to that the fact that the government of Quebec is financing companies like Thera and Katana in various ways, and the research behind all that was out of the academic world in Quebec and this is financed with public money through university. From the government point of view it was also a good marriage because it made sense economically for the province.
Wino115 wrote: That was a question in the KOL event and Marsolais emphatically stated their peptide does not cross BBB and Beliveau nodded along with him.
My recollection from reading some of the original Katana and Angiochem material was that the labs initial focus was finding a way to cross the BBB and designing drugs for that purpose. That is what Angiochem is doing. same team also discovered this peptide that latched to sort1. It didn't work for brain tumors, but they saw it could work for other solid tumors with high Sort1 and spun the tech out as Katana. When they were pitching it around the whole science behind sort1 was still very early. You can see from the dates of Beliveau articles on the website that it was truly groundbreaking science UQAM did. They beat the Gothenburg guys by years.I'm sure one of the reasons Katana took a year or more to find a partner was that it was so early and very little clinical work had been done around that idea. It fit well with an equally smallish company able to put $10mil down to see if it could advance in the lab. Kudos to THTX mgmt for taking that risk.
qwerty22 wrote:
Sortilin is best known as a brain protein, it's expressed on the surface of neurons. I would think one of the first things you look at is does it cross the BBB. If Katana/thtx haven't ticked this off the to do list early in the process then we are invested in fools. Could they have not done this? Are they all fools?
SABBOBCAT wrote: Wasn't Katana working on peptides to cross the blood bran barrier before selling the platform to TH? Is there any risk that the PDC would cross the BBB and have into tended side effects?