It means simply that we own bisantrene and in order to get...

It means simply that we own bisantrene and in order to get around our patents they need to find a new molecule not covered by our patents that hits FTO. They may well succeed, but this comes with two major issues.

1. Bisantrene is already a very potent inhibitor of FTO. The IC50 (the concentration that inhibits 50% of the enzyme) is 142nM! It is not going to be easy to find a drug that has a lower IC50 than this (lower is better), but even if you did it is unlikely to make any real difference in its use. Fentanyl is much more potent than morphine, but this doesn’t make Fentanyl a better opioid - just one more difficult to get the dose right.

2. The COH group are starting from scratch in the drug development process. They now have to go through the whole preclinical, toxicology, manufacturing, and Phase I dose escalation process. This takes years and years and even if you succeed you have no idea if some unexpected side effects will show up when you move into the larger trials. As far as I am aware they don’t have the money to do any of this - costs in the range of US$20 to US$200 million dollars are typical to do all this.