PYC, page-7

Hi Andrew,

Hope you are well and nice to see you still around and holding in there. Great questions.
PYC is overselling EET "in its current form". It is absolutely no holy grail for anything. It does or did allow them to find potentially better endosome escape peptides compared to the historic benchmark Tat peptide. But is doesn't resolve the cell targeting aspect, which is what I said before. If you could specifically target a drug to cells and also get it to release from the endosome, now you are on to something. PYC peptides cannot do this. They try to say....ok....but we can.....we will make one peptide that facilitates endosome escape, and then develop another peptide to target the diseased cells, and then also put on the drug. SO it becomes a 3 part functional molecule with 3 parts....that all need to be linked together....its quite a challenge from so many standpoints. Previously they just but their Tat-alternative on Omomyc and gave it to cells, and of course it worked, and then injected directly to tumors in mice. Its nice it worked, but its academic. They need real-life application, and if it was given systemically (e.g. travels throughout body) most would never get to the tumor cells....there is no target functionality. If they add the targeting functionality, it becomes having to add two different peptides (one EE and one targeting to cells) to the drug. I am sorry, but this is nice on paper and would make a good publication as a proof of concept, but the idea has been around for a long time, and even been published on in various formats, but a commercial route through the approval process....sorry but i see this as being extremely complicated from GMP manufacturing to immunogenicity, stability, ADME, god the list goes on.

So in its current form, it is just not attractive to big pharma, beyond a dabble with it, and that is why they can't get a real drug discovery deal on it....proof of concept (POC) deals are all they will see until they can prove it and significantly de-risk the approach. Again, not saying it is impossible, but there is a long long way to go to prove it. Without the targeting functionality, e.g. where they are now, it is just an alternative to Tat, granted a better one, but no one is going to buy PYC at this stage, even at its cheap price....AGAIN the onus is now on PYC to use the new nice long cash runway to bring this idea from academic to true commercial potential, so we will see where they get it to in the coming years I guess.