RE:RE:Needs the hard data stillI can't agree with the statement that the OO was inevitable at that low price level as had the company put more effort into having a legitimate IR effort all along, notably by being more straightforward with investors, they would not have had as deep a hole as they are digging out of now. But it is also clear they are starting to get that sorted out and thus there is some hope things will keep getting better. The presentation yesterday was excellent and, while we cannot be too aggressive until the data starts flowing in several months from now, it would be hard not to be confident about a good outcome given what we know. As each day passes without the trial being stopped for safety issues, that confidence grows, since if the drug is safe in humans, the probability that it will also be efficacious grows too (the more drug that can be applied to the tumor, the better the chance of success). So while still irritated that THTX's stock is not given a fair shake by the market at the moment while all kinds of nonsense is being given way too much credit, it is not hard to see that this unfair treatment of THTX's stock may soon be coming to an end.
jfm1330 wrote: I think we now have the proof that the last financing was unavoidable at terms similar to what was done. The market is simply unwilling to give them the benefit of the doubt on anything. They will swallow cr*p from other companies, but Thera is clearly on the black list of most. The market is very reluctant to give them credit for anything, but with real positive hard data on humans, some will change their minds and will recognize the reality. But it is quite clear now that we still have to wait a few months to see the beginning of that process.
The presentation yeserday was excellent, and the non verbal part was very telling in my view. These guys know more than us and they are very confident. Marsolais said that they were close to the MTD of free docetaxel, and if there is no neutropenia at all at that point, it will not happen drastically at the next higher dose. Toxicity appears gradually with dose increases. All that to say that they are already convinced that TH1902 MTD will be much higher than the MTD of docetaxel. They are convinced of that. They know it is the way it looks right now, but they still need to prove it. A much higher MTD would be a very strong signal of probable efficacy.
Again. Go back to the Q&A part of the presentation and look at their faces when asked if TH1902 would work better the more a cancer is at an advanced stage. They smile, but at the same time they try not to smile too much. They are convinced that they have something special in their hands because the combination of the features of the PDC and the target (sortilin) is so great. A small peptide with very high loading capacity while retaing affinity to sortilin with a selectively cleavable linker. The ideal target, sortilin, a membrane receptor whose role is to import/export large molecules through the cellular membrane by way of endocytosis, which allows to bypass a resistance mechanism to docetaxel, and the best part is the expression of sortilin is very low in all healthy tissues, except the neurones, but TH1902 does not cross the blood brain barrier, and the expression is high in many cancers, and increases as the cancer evolves to a more agressive stage. Really the perfect target to treat refractory advanced cancers. Obviously, not all cancer are expressing sortilin, but the percentage of them that do express it represents an enormous part of all cancers, so an gigantic potential market. If it would succeed with only 10% of that, it would still be a blockbuster platform, because, again, the real value is not only in TH1902, but in the peptide (TH19P01) that can be loaded with any cytotoxic agent. Marsolais said it verbatim yesterday.
In a way I am back to my "too good to be true" that I was repeating about the ibalizumab deal a few years ago. In the end, ibalizumab (Trogarzo) ended up as a commercial failure, but there was a window of opportunity to make a lot of money with it. I was dumb enough to miss it, like many others here that are now very frustrated because of that. But now we are up for another opportunity. I am quite convinced it will be really good. How good? I am not sure, but good enough. That being said, it seems the market still believes that it looks too good to be true, and the Trogarzo fiasco is probably an explaination as to why there is so much skepticism. But reality always catch up and the answer is becomes clear.