Graham
We are hearing next to nothing about the status of the Company’s 3 clinical studies. Plus, Dr Mautner said in a recent interview that the most likely next catalyst would come from CRO-67 coming into the clinic and that would take about a year. She also talked about the coming focus for the Company being on the pre-clinical drug programs. A year is a helluva long time to wait for good news with the share price in the gutter. What’s your view of this situation?
Bob
Happy to respond on the basis of what’s in the public domain.
The Company’s drug pipeline certainly deserves being talked up. We should all be excited by its potential. So, no criticism there.
CRO-67,the pancreatic cancer drug, is an exciting and potentially very valuable drug asset. It’s first-in-class, it meets a need that no other drug appears to be capable of meeting, it looks on track to get key patent grant. It ticks all the industry boxes and I fail to see how it won’t be snapped up by a major.
With M&A deals more and more involving pre-clinical assets, drugs like CRO-67are prime for the picking.
The other pipeline assets mightn’t get the headlines, but they are all exciting prospects that were put in place to ensure a post-Veyonda future of the Company.
Which rings me back to your question. The Veyonda clinical program is the main game currently and that deserves to be the headlined news. The Veyonda program deliberately has taken a multi-functional approach by combining it with chemotherapy, radiotherapy and immunotherapy. That’s a considerably de-risked strategy made possible by the multi-modal way that Veyonda works. No single treatment is going to work for every cancer patient, so having a range of different ways to use the one drug just adds to its value.
Eachone of those 3 studies, and the IONIC study in particular, is capable of delivering proof-of-concept data early on that could serve as a major catalyst.
By their very nature, clinical trials are slow-moving creatures, with the enormous individual variation in cases meaning that data needs to be treated with caution until enough patients have been treated to account for that variation.
Nevertheless, IONIC, DARRT and CEP trials have inbuilt review points involving the merits of continuing with the study based on drug safety and evidence of benefit, and I look forward to hearing from those review points in all 3 clinical studies over the course of the coming year.
Graham
