Promising Developments in the Theralase® Project Girish Kulkarni: Yeah, so I think one of the advantages here is it is a urologist run therapy. Urologists are comfortable going to the OR and treating patients cystoscopically or endoscopically. It's a single treatment. So that's very appealing. And if patients are doing well, there's a maintenance treatment at six months. If they don't have progressive disease, they're also eligible in the trial for a six month treatment. So basically it's two treatments and you're done. So that's the appealing part of the study. So patients who are coming from a distance in large states, for example, Texas, large countries like mine, Canada, where patients have to travel five or six hours to get their treatments, is far more practical than an intravesical therapy, and it doesn't have any of the systemic side effects of immune checkpoint inhibitors.
Ashish Kamat: Yeah. Speaking of systemic side effects, I remember the previous times of photo-sensitizers, where patients had to literally cover themselves from head to toe and go about. And you don't have to do that with this one. If you could just enlighten the audience a little bit on the mechanistic as to why is this new agent so much different from the older ones? Because some of them might be remembering the old data, and might be a little gun shy. So a little bit there
Promising Developments in the Theralase® Project of Intravesical Photodynamic Therapy for BCG Unresponsive Bladder Cancer - Girish Kulkarni (urotoday.com)