RE:PDC'sIn my view, Melflufen in not an PDC. It's a prodrug. It's not aiming at a cellular target, the added amino acid is there just to increase the lipophilicity and allow the prodrug to enter the cells. Once inside the cells, the prodrug is cleaved in two parts releasing the free drug. It has nothing of the targeted element and selective distribution associated with the principle behingd PDCs concept.
Lu177-Dotatate is a real PDC, it's the drug I took and will take again and that saved my life, but Lu177-Dotatate does not have a cleavable linker to selectively release a free drug inside cells. It has a stable linker because there is no need to have free Lu177 to have the radiation damaging DNA.
So at this time, there is no approved PDC achieving all the parts of PDC desingned to release selectively a chemotherapy molecule like docetaxel. TH1902 would be the first one approved if it get to that stage. As I said before, it seems that TH1902 would be the first PDC that was able to selectively release a chemo drug into cells in humans.
So TH1902 would be a real breakthrough, a first in class therapy and platform if it would prove without a doubt to be able to selectively deliver docetaxel inside cells expressing sortilin in real human patients. To my knowledge it has never been achieve before.
TH1902 wrote: Currently there are only 2 PDC's that have FDA approval (article is one year old).
Some info on current PDC's here:
https://www.biochempeg.com/article/199.html