I shall not be too critical of an analyst who has written exactly what I have said many times on this board in the past.
I, too, have pointed out that Zevalin (the one of the two with Y-90) is a commercial failure, that it takes an expensive and specialized infrastructure to deal with radiopharmaceuticals, that such treatments are therefore costly, that toxicities (with Zevalin) are high, and that there are better approaches to the problem. I have said here, quite bluntly, that Immunomedics should stop frittering away capital trying to develop RAIT treatments.
That said, I am willing to be proven wrong. IF the anecdotal stories about hPAM4 hold up, and IF the company has discovered a winning niche for RAIT treatments, no one would be happier than me.
However, for now, there is NO PUBLIC DATA. (I don't count Calvin and Martha as data.) Until the company publishes the full results of an actual study in a peer-reviewed journal, the analyst is doing his job well in pointing out that RAIT is an historically bad strategy.
Finally, I should point out, that Y-90 may not end up being the best conjugate. If you watched 60 Minutes last Sunday they had a story on research at MD Anderson where the conjugate is a gold nanoparticle. Just like metal overheats in a microwave oven, the gold nanoparticle can get very hot if you put it (inside the body) inside of a strong radio-wave field. Preclinical research is showing that you can kill cancer cells selectively by burning them this way. The gold nanoparticles are easier to deal with than Y-90, and they only kill cells when and where the RF is applied. |
