Many of you may have been following the amazing technology at Duke that uses modified Polio virus to attack cancer. They have a trial underway on glioblastoma that has been curing patients, and those that have died have been dying from overdosing the therapy rather than from the cancer (it is a phase one trial to determine dosing). A CBS 60 Minutes special just aired on this therapy:
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/polio-cancer-treatment-duke-university-60-minutes-scott-pelley/
On one hand, a therapy like this is a threat to Sirtex, because within a few years that kind of therapy might cure liver cancer, undoing the need for Sirtex's spheres. On the other hand, maybe this is an opportunity.
If Sirtex paid Duke now to obtain an exclusive license to commercialize this therapy, it is potentially a perfect fit. The reason is that Sirtex has great technology for delivering a chemical to a targeted area of the body. And this particular therapy requires that you instrument a line directly into the tumor you want to kill, in order to get the virus inside the tumor. Sirtex seems to have a lot of core expertise in fairly non invasive means of positioning a catheter into veins that directly feed a tumor. That might be very synergistic to the Duke Polio drug.
It would be a huge win for Sirtex to obtain rights to that drug even without the pre-existing technology being synergistic. The drug is in Phase 1 trials, so there is still a chance to get a deal done. Once efficacy is widely demonstrated I don't think Sirtex would have any chance at all of competing against larger pharmaceutical companies.
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