From Maciste's point of view I see what he is saying about being cautious but it doesn't take a brain scientist to see all the hints on why data should be good. Which is why I don't agree with Maciste on this board at all.
1.) First, it's a plenary session. Plenary means opening of the entire conference. This is not some small presentation in a breakout room with an audience of 5 or 10 people. It's in the opening conference 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m in front of the entire attendees/presenters at AACR 2019. I doubt that AACR would pick Marker's data if it was terrible data and or mediocre data.
2.) As many have mentioned before the CEO on youtube at the presentation talking about presenting data in solid tumors for pancreatic cancer kind of smirks a bit like he knows something but can't share it yet.
3,) Prior evidence of data shows that after patients become complete responders in blood cancer, they don't relapse. MultiTAA has proven to work well as good as if not better than CAR-T therapies.
4,) Epitope spreading. What's the #1 problem with targeting solid tumors? CAR-T therapies have trouble, like many other types of technologies/platforms because tumors are heterogenous in nature. They have a spread of multiple antigens on the cell surface. Considering that MultiTAA can target 5 antigens is the first good step. Even better epitope spreading allows other dormant parts of the immune system to attack other antigens on the cell surface not directed by MultiTAA therapy because of epitope spreading. The point is that it's hard for a tumor to evade therapy when it has multiple antigen targets being directed at it. The reason why CAR-T and other therapies fail is because they only can target one antigen at a time.
5,) The pancreatic cancer data was supposed to be presented at ASCO 2019. The reason why it wasn't is because they picked the wrong track where they couldn't release any clinical data. Think about that for a second, why rush to post earlier data at ASCO 2019 if it was bad? Wouldn't it better to wait to get more patients enrolled first? It's because they were excited to showcase the data.
6,) evidence #6 and probably the best I can point to. The company filed a $200 million shelf offering. If the data was not good they could have just implemented the cash raise now before the conference/data. Why wait for the bad data to tank the stock? then do a cash raise? IMO they are going to wait for data release and then raise cash as the stock price is expected to be higher.
7,) conference call on Monday after weekend presentation. Trust me on this management would not want to host a conference call a few days after the presentation if they weren't excited to retell the data/story of what they observed.
If anyone else can think of other pieces of evidence please post, but thank you keithamdMIC for your commentary you are spot on. As for Maciste I think they are a bit lost on what's going on here.
