Media, page-387

Another candidate on the same race lane will need longer time or tougher fight to win.

Not that I am happy with Mirati's failure or I do not believe their drug will win by the end. I think those bio-molecule targeted therapy will be a big part of the oncology treatment to take over chemo for the future. Well biologically, those targeted therapy is actaully chemo, but narrowed to the targeted cell population, and therefore a much better version of chemo. Still the fundemental difference to immuno therapy is that chemo or targeted chemo kill cells directly, while immuno drug alone does not kill cells, but modulating another population in the body to kill cnacer cells. Hence the potential side effect of direct killing mechanism is argubly worse than immuno therapy. At least that is the demonstration of mainstream data for the last few decades.

Coming back to our case on Immutep, the whole pharma news reporting field is discussing Immutep's results lately. Some of those debates flagged out that the good phase 2 result is not concreting successful phase 3 and/or FDA approval by the end. This can be shown case by Roche's TIGIT and of course Mirati here.

Sure, no one is able to 100% predict the outcome of a large phase 3 trial. Though, with TIGIT or Mirati's candidate, or lots of others, the drug trial is much more dependent on the selection of one or more biomarkers, i.e., PDL1 level, one of the cancer mutation markers, etc. The thing I like EFTI the most is that the trials are mostly non-selective, i.e., PDL1 all comer and not relying on any mutation or any biomarker.

When you look at Immutep's multiple phase 2, they are not small number trial, particularly if counting all the patients for lung cancer, approaching 170.
Also, the responders from all these phase 2 cohorts are crossing multiple cancer types, melanoma, breast cancer, lung caner, head and neck; and crossing all subgroups with all kind of PDL1 levels; and from both 1st line and 2nd line, with even those chemo+PD1 treatment failed patients responded..........

With all evidence together, I think the risk of EFTI not perform well in a large number phase 3 is dramatically reduced. Plus, we do not need to finish a phase 3 for surviving. The coming TACTI003 phase 2b is very possible registrational relevant.