"When a company is considering whether to in-license a drug, not...

"When a company is considering whether to in-license a drug, not only is it important to understand the drug, but it is imperativethat you understand the reasons a company wishes to out-license it. It generally is not enough just to like the drug. As the saying goes, if a deal sounds too good to be true, it is too good to be true. However, there were clear reasons why a company like Genentech might have shelved GDC-0084, even though it appeared extremely promising to Kazia."

These reasons were:
1) Genentech had started GDC-0084’s clinical development down a well-trodden path, when that did not pan out, even a storied drug developer such as Genentech can be blinkered and fail to see a way forward,
2) While the results were in-line with hind-sight expectations, given the strong theory behind GDC-0084, Genentech may have been hoping for an accelerated approval, which would have made commercialisation of the drug much easier,
3) Finally, as mentioned, Genentech is owned by Roche and Roche is a massive company. Anything, short of a near blockbuster is unlikely to move the revenue dial of the company enough to get senior managers excited."

"An accepted practice in cancer drug development has been to study the drug in the last line of treatment for that cancer. There are a range of reasons for this but, suffice to say that with paxalisib, that strategy did not return the results that were hoped for. It is generally accepted that cancers become harder to treat as they progress and see more lines (different drugs) of therapy. Kazia presumed the reason Genentech obtained the results it did was because the patients’ cancers were too resistant to treatment by the time they studied them. From the literature, it appears any drug that comes after first-line treatment in GBM will be facing a near impossible task until we understand the disease a lot better.
In working out how they would study paxalisib to give it the best possible chance at success, Kazia hypothesized that taking the opposite strategy to Genentech and studying paxalisib earlier in the treatment of GBM patients may be the way to go. The reason for this that GBM is a very aggressive cancer and patients decline rapidly. By treating the GBM patients as early as they possibly could, they would also be treating the cancer when it was in its least resistant state. This would give paxalisib a better chance of having a clinically meaningful effect. Kazia also thought there might also another benefit to treating the cancer a patients earlier. Since they would be healthier, they may be able to tolerate a higher dose of paxalisib."