NorthWest Biotherapeutics Inc (NWBO)

[OncoJock]

I just watched Dr. Steven Brem of UPenn give a preview and highlights of Dr. Liau's presentation on Sunday. He gave it during a CME symposium timed to coincide with SNO. He was careful to give Dr. Liau lots of credit, but you could also tell he was incredibly proud of the data and the positive results. He joked about his poor batting average, having been involved in about 100 of the roughly 400 previous failed clinical trials in GBM. He presented one main slide, with lots of condensed highlights on it, all text and no graphics or Kaplan Meier curves as I recall, I think he was trying to avoid stealing Dr. Liau's thunder, but also trying to give his audience some juicy tidbits that would encourage them to watch the full presentation on Sunday. In fact that's exactly what he encouraged his listeners to do.

His presentation was made more powerful by the fact that his predecessor on the podium had just given a long, sad recap of many failed efforts to advance the SOC in GBM, including a wide variety of therapies such as bevacizumab, rindopepimut, nivolumab, pembrolizumab, etc. etc. The gentleman who spoke before Dr. Brem had an Indian name I will not try to spell here, but he said he was excited about the prospects of a targeted therapy against the NTRK gene fusion, he mentioned two competing therapies one is larotrectinib, the other entrectinib (the former made by Bayer, the latter made by Genentech), and he showed promising clinical trial data. But he also mentioned that the NTRK gene fusion is only found in a very small percentage of patients with GBM, I think he said 1% or maybe 4%. In any case, it's only a tiny fraction of the total population. It's clear that to me that the dendritic cell vaccine approach is vastly superior, since by using the patient's own tumor antigens, the whole problem of antigen targeting is solved in the most effective possible way.

Morale is high tonight.

Go team NWBO!