AACR PostersI'm intrigued to see these once they post them. I know everything around the oncology approach is in question now, but one thing that can happen commercially is that you look at these different combos and prove enough of the pre-clinical science that adding your drug to a standard approach makes it multiple-times more efficacious. We've seen that with plenty of these new genetic target drugs.
The reason this one involving PD-L1 is interesting is because there's a long list of companies trying to develop versions of it because it's been shown to be successful in certain types of tumors. So my thought is that it may intrigue someone looking to break in to that market to at least run a cohort of patients in a trial doing the combo that THTX did in this study. Lab work is valid in at least proving a hypothesis to test and if you can do it within reasonable cost, someone may bite.
The other thing is that I recall looking at a list of Chinese biotechs all rapidly pursuing getting in to the ADC and oncology game and it seemed like half had a PD-1 on their list of drugs they were trying to develop. It's a wildcard, but if those studies have some strikingly good numbers coming out, it may be decent partnership bait to attract someone to run with it. Wishful thinking and definitely take that grain of salt as it's only mildly positive unless we know more.
We'll just have to wait and see what kind of numbers they produced versus standard therapy to see if the delta is big.