Jeg stilte Godfrey spørsmålet via Radforsk podcasten om å bruke biomarkøren til å gjøre forsøk kun på AXL+ (takk til longia for transcript)
Elisabeth Andersen: [00:23:51] And the next question. Since clearly bemcentinib is the most efficient on AXL positive, have you planned trials that just cover that group.
Richard Godfrey: [00:24:01] Ah, well I mean that’s, we’ve been talking about this for a long time, that we know that AXL positive patients have a worse prognosis, we know bemcentinib is selective AXL and only engages with AXL positive diseases. We’ve developed a composite score that measures AXL both on the cancer cell and the immune cells, both of which are involved in preserving survival of the cancer, which, of course, is a bad thing. So would we like to do trials in AXL positive patients only? Maybe sure, one day? That would be an ambition. I think as a scientist, you know, we have to be careful that we don’t profess to know all the answers, so sometimes it’s useful to do an uncommon study and then do a retrospective analysis because we just don’t know what we don’t know. So I think we reserve judgment on whether we do preselected AXL positive patients. It’s certainly one trial design that we can consider, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with doing a new kind of study, particularly the early stages of developing a first class drug and then doing a retrospective analysis, because you might learn a whole lot more by doing that.
Richard Godfrey: [00:25:20] The other important thing to remember is that the only way we get the biomarker and the diagnostic approved is to do the validation study that would require a negative control. We must actually have those all cancer patients so that we can discern from them. So it’s not it’s not quite as straightforward as it might appear to be from looking at the data in order to get the full benefit from doing a trial. So, but certainly one day, I think we often accept this, that we hope that we could have what we call a precision medicine approach to the commercialization, meaning that, you know, if we can say that it’s only the AXL positive patients that benefit, and we only want AXL positive patients to be prescribed our drug. And it would appear from all the work that we’ve done on others is that more than half of the patients seem to be AXL positive and the other patients have the worst prognosis. So it’s a very significant market size and a very significant patient population.