RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:News out 👀 You have to acknowledge that Sortilin is a poorly understood target in cancer. If you take that perspective then adding the the fundamental knowledge is value-adding especially when it's sharply directed towards some of the questions of the program. Moving forward with both the science and clinical data is still key. Hopefully, eventually they'll be reporting some good clinical data. It wouldn't surprise me if/when that happens if they ended up referring back to this data to give that clinical data some more context. The absence of clinical data is painful though, no arguing with that.
jeffm34 wrote: They are now 20 months into the Phase 1 trial and they are still using pre clincial studies to try and validate the platform. This poster should have been highlighting some patient specific data from the trial.
jfm1330 wrote: The big takeaway from this poster is the fact that cancer stages don't matter much for many cancers tested. Also, it does not solve anything related to the proof of concept. We are still swimming in hypothetic stuff. As long as we don't have the proof of concept, all that and the preclinical work and any ideas about new PDC could be worthless. It would also have been interesting to know what was the scores all of their different types of grafted tumors on nude mice that they used for preclinical work. This would have given a better understanding of how it could translate to humans. Also, remember that this is in vitro testing where the tissue is chemically treated before and after staining, how would these results correlate with in vivo testing of receptor expression like it is the case with Dotatate Ga68 for example. Also, how would it compare with gene expression testing for sortilin.
Add to that the fact that membrane sortilin can be cleaved to generate soluble sortilin. Another thing is turnaround of outside cell membrane sortilin. We know there is intracellular sortilin related to membrane organelles lile Golgi apparatus and endoplasmic reticulum and there is a recuperation cycle associated with that. So in vitro staining is a snapshot of sortilin presence on the outside cell membrane, while the in vivo process is dynamic with sortilin coming in and going out of the outside membrane. All that to say that this is a very little piece of the puzzle, and not a crtitical one in my view. We desperately want to see data strongly hinting at a proof of concept. I know I insist a lot of that, but it is obviously critical for the whole thing.
Now we have TH1902, a PDC that is a candidate drug, proof of concept gives you a platform. With proof of concept it would no longer be only about TH1902. In other words, if docetaxel is not good enough as a cytotoxic agent, you can go with another one. Yes there would be big delays in that case, but still, you have a valid approach. If the concept is invalid, it's the end of everthing. That's why it would be so important to have that. Until we have this critical milestone, we are in the world of hypotheses. Without proof of concept, total failure of the SORT1+ plarform is a possibility. With proof of concept the question becomes how good can it be? Is TH1902 the best possible PDC out of that platform, etc... I know it's early. I know they cannot answer all the question at once, but at the same time they are so slow in the clinical trial and so secretive