Sad to see the usual uninformed comment about pre-clinical data....

Sad to see the usual uninformed comment about pre-clinical data. There are a couple of golden rules that should always be borne in mind.
1. Curing a mouse of an implanted human cancer doesn't guarantee success in a human. But I can't see any doctor willing to use an experimental drug on a patient that hasn't shown some evidence of having worked in an animal model.
2. The degree of positive anti-cancer effect in a mouse model is no guarantee of degree of effect in a human, either way.

Before critiquing the NOX data, go back and look at the ATX pre-clinical data.

Both ATX and NOX drugs have a common aim - to reduce the shield of collagen in a pancreatic tumour that blocks the ability of chemotherapies to get to the cancer cells. This collagen is formed by the stromal (fibroblast) cells in the tumour, part of the so-called tumour micro-environment.

It looks to me that the ATX drug is trying to achieve that by preventing the collagen forming the shield by inhibiting the enzyme (FAK) that helps form the collagen fibres after the collagen has been produced.

From what has been published about the NOX drug, it is trying to achieve that by shuttng down the fibroblasts in the first place. This approach has two advantages. First, the collagen isn't produced in the first place. Second, the stromal cells do more than just produce collagen. They produce growth factors that the cancer cells rely on for their aggressive growth. In the long-run, that could prove to be a crucially important double act.

Let's wish good luck to both companies.