Indeed a terrible year for PPHM stock, but there seems to have been considerable company consolidation. The science continues to have great credibility IMO, and the anti-PS platform is stronger than a year ago. MAB applicability in general, and anti-PS MAB(specifically)continues to expand. I moved my investment from IMCL to PPHM a decade ago because I thought Cotara was the next generation of MAB that could carry cytotoxic agents beyond cell membrane into the necrotic core of cancer cells where surviving cancer cells spawn recurrences. And I thought Bavi would be carrying a cytotoxic payload to tumor vasculature and cancer cell membrane and stroma. The misfortune PPHM experienced with clinical trials did not start or stop with the mislabeling debacle in the P2 Bavi NSCLC trial last September, but instead in the decision to pair Bavi with chemotherapy for initial trials, and not with irradiation therapy. This decision was due to another strategic error: to pursue the observation that Bavi is (weakly) IMMUNOGENIC. Our warhorse Bavi! originally a state of the art MAB missile delivery system with an exclusive docking site on cancer cell membranes. That was exciting. Now "naked" Bavi is charged with doing battle against established cancers, some of them enormous, and without a payload. After a very promising lung cancer trial combining Bavi with "chemotherapy", Bavi is now being tried in combination with still "weaker sisters", or "down-stream immunomodulators". A dud by any other name is still an immunomodulator. Does anyone think upstream and downstream immunomodulators are going to eliminate large cancer masses? Those incurable by all other conceivable modalities? The role of these agents is in very early cancers, those too small to be detected by current clinical screening tests. So battle-axe missile Cotara, enormous and outdated in design, sinks deeper into mothballs and silence. Carrying I131 to cancer cells, and bombing the necrotic cancer core is sensible. Mothballing Cotara-MAB is not. Meanwhile, silence in world literature from China about its experience with Cotara and lung cancer. No good news. No bad news. No news. Strange. Why won't the Chinese publish, "It does/doesn') work. Communications lines jammed. Blackouts on news. Not strange to anyone else? No explanation demanded. None required. Cotara, one of the most efficacious agents used to date against glioblastoma multiforme is back-burnered. But of course one of the problems with the brain cancer trial and Cotara is that we did not run a control group of I131 only delivered into the GBM tumor mass with the special delivery catheter. That is, who needs the cotara when you have the catheter. And back to Bavi: the idea is to humanize it and add a payload. Where are we with that project? Anything new out of Affitec? Russia? Anyone?
