Biomaven, Jess, and Zuize, while there have been some researchers that for a year or so, have been experimenting with Ponatinib with ALS tissue in petri dishes, and the results are quite encouraging, however, for some reason, the Chairman, President and CEO of Ariad, Dr. Harvey Berger, and the President of Ariad's R&D, Tim Clackson, don't believe it will work. Do you think they have a better understanding of their internally discovered compounds, or do the outside scientists? Ariad doesn't have the funds to do anything wih ALS, but at the same token, they don't want to partner it either, at least not yet. Approval would take a long, long time and be very expensive. There must be a strong set of reasons why Harvey isn't pounding the table on this, don't ya think? Call me a pragmatist. I lost my rose colored glasses years ago.. They do not work in biotech. I extracted the post above from a recent post over on iHub, and I tend to agree. Ariad isn't on board.
Next, this recent post below is from iHub and is from a well respected poster on iHub, 2damoon, and is a interesting response from Ariad. Again, Ariad says ALS and other non-cancer indications for Ponatinib are not going to be developed by them or any partners as it could jeopardize their cancer franchise. Not sure how it can be any clearer. There are dreamers on every stock chat board I guess..
HB replied to my email to him about neuro INDs for Pona. (Obviously before my view of his leadership changed for the worse). Let's hope there has been reconsideration of Pona in treating these conditions, safety, other mechanisms, etc. 7/13/14 Dear ----, Thanks very much for your note. You make some interesting points, but I believe that the situation is much more complex than you suggest. We are aware of the non-clinical early target validation work that has been published on the role of c-ABL in Parkinson's Disease and other neurodegenerative diseases. We are staying on top of the literature and have ongoing preclinical collaborations with various academic groups to better understand the underlying biology and to obtain data on ponatinib for exploratory purposes. Our patent application stakes out our early position in the field. There also are case reports showing the activity of imatinib in rheumatoid arthritis. The targets of imatinib that have been implicated in the mechanism of action include KIT (mast cells), PDGFR and CSFR1 (c-fms). It is unclear whether ponatinib has any advantages to imatinib with respect to these targets (especially the native forms of the kinases). Novartis has run a trial of imatinib in pulmonary artery hypertension, but this development has now been terminated due, I believe, to the availability of more efficacious agents. All in all, the non-cancer application of ponatinib represents an interesting area for collaborative research, but not investment by us or others. On a separate note, out-licensing the non-cancer indications would create substantial challenges from regulatory and commercial perspectives. Our team uniformly believes that different doses, differential pricing strategies, and greater concerns about safety issues outside of oncology would make out-licensing virtually impossible and could undermine our oncology franchise built around ponatinib. Please let me know if you have any further questions. Warmest regards and thanks for your continued interest. Harvey
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