RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:New Press Release - Theratechnologies Announces Path to Resume TH1902 Clinical Development It is helpful and was probably necessary for them to "officially" announce material experts joining a corporate committee tasked with a key goal. You can't not release it once it's official.
It's also useful in that it should prompt some probing by the analysts so we may find out a bit more on timelines, decision points, costs. To conclude anything here is probably way to early and we need to hear them talk about all these points.
If they follow what some of these other PDC dosage trials have done, the patient selection may mean different doses based on cancer type (cybrexa only did high dose on breast and NSCL. Neither of those cancers used the low dose yet) and perhaps a bio marker test so they know there's a lot of sort, or maybe they just know certain low probability exclusion markers the data showed. That's equally helpful --toss the high probability non responders. For all we know, the data may have shown other relationships like the one they talked about already - that being one certain cancer (melanoma?) where prior treatment used one type of immunotherapy saw less effect. Marsolais was strong on that conclusion. While it will always be an experiment at this stage, if they can figure out a combination of ways based on that teams past trial design and accumulated knowledge how to move the probability of seeing successs up by 10-20%, that's a lot. Maybe they don't get there.
It's interesting a breast cancer specialist is on board because the theoretical work showed it should work well there. But we never heard about a specific TNBC patient. That's a useful voice who must have ideas on best way to think about it for TNBC.
To me it reads like they hope to do a small dosage to see what comes with this new approach and it will tell them yes or no, there is something there. It needs to be within the budget constraints, so they need to tell us what those are. Maybe it's beyond this years budget, but tell us that. Maybe they can swing it since some of the upfront fixed costs are already paid for. If yes, find a partner or raise money. Remember, Cybrexa only saw 4/8 in urothial and 1/2 and 2/4 in breast and NSCL. It totaled 49, but you may be able to tell something with a small group at this point and not 50. Use that data for partner talks. Cybrexa had good response numbers on small ITT population and it got them a large public partner in Excelixis. They should talk about the path in 2 weeks.