RE:RE:RE:RE:hyping THAgain, the best comparative for us with TH1902 or SORT1 platform as a whole is Lutathera. This is a real PDC that is effective at stopping disease progression and, in many cases, to yield tumor regression. Lutathera is also a cure for some neuroendocrine cancer patients since less than 1% of patients see complete response after many treatment cycles, but again, it is less than 1% of the cases. Probably the one with low tumor burden and very high somatostatin receptor expression. But for most patient it is a way to slow down cancer progression by pushing it back for a while. But as juniper88 says, it is a way to treat cancer as a chronic illness. To allow also to gain time until new treatments could be available.
Imagine a neuroendocrine cancer patient now that has been treated with Lutathera and has his cancer stopped from progressing since a few years. He can have other cycles of treatment to keep it idle for a while, but imagine that SORT1 plaform is really valid, that would open an array of possibilities if his cancer is expressing sortilin, and Thera listed neuroendocrine cancer as part of the ones overexpressing sortilin. My point is that a treatment like Lutathera could work for a few years (5 to 7 years), but then you would have TH1902 or another PDC based on TH19P01 that would be able to take the relay. I am giving the example of SORT1 PDCs, but it could be something else. The hope of many cancer patient is not really for a cure, that is seen by most of them as being in the range of miracle. No. The hope now is to have cancer treated as a chronic disease with a succession of different treatments. If TH1902 and other PDCs out of the SORT1 platform can achieve that, it would be an enormous contribution, and Thera would be worth a lot.
juniper88 wrote: I agree, interpretation is important here. TH1902 won't cure all cancer, nothing will and JFM wrote that also. Can it be a "cure" for some patients? Maybe, we will have to wait and see. You will never really know if you are cured until the day you die of something other than the cancer because the reality is it can always come back. I have seen a documented case of 26 years of remission followed by a relapse in Ovarian cancer. Nowadays, cancer is thought of as a long term chronic disease. If TH1902 can put a patient in long term remission that would be fantastic. Like Parp inhibitors now putting some BRCA+ in long term remission. Or what herceptin has done for HER2+ breast cancer patients. I believe the Sort platform (not necessarily TH1902) has the potential to make that kind of impact on cancer patients that are SORT+. Maybe it will be a "cure" for some patients?