Replies to post #3616 on Halozyme Therapeutics Inc (HALO)

[Fred Kadiddlehopper]

In fact, I have never seen such a blatant showing of cards regarding another Enhanze deal in the entire time you and I have been watching HALO (over 8 years now! Geez!) Almost sounds like they are simply waiting for the ink to dry before announcing it.
I can't say who would jump into insulin program, but it is certainly not dead. They are merely formalizing the fact that they are highly focused on PEG right now. No reason to keep spending money on progressing insulin when a partner can do it for free.
Secondly, it would seem that the PEG pre-clinical and clinical results must be pretty hair-raising for them to put such a concentrated focus on this prospect. They seem to have an extremely high degree of confidence. The FDA's fast track and orphan designations point to the same.
Lastly, Helen as much as promised that we will be getting more partnership news in 2015.
All-in-all a very interesting conference call.

[friendofthedevil]

I had thought they might select first line targeted molecular therapy as something PEG could help with in NSCLC. (see my posts 3560 and 3562) My thought was to find a lung cancer set with narrow treatment options that was most associated with high HA. While I still think PEG could help in this population, in retrospect, it does make sense why they would chose the population they did.

HALO wants a population that is numerous (not only for the ease of filling the trial but also in consideration of the size of initial treatment group and subsequent revenues), has a very short OS (in consideration of length of trial), and has high HA association. Certainly, the population of NSCLC that has recurred after first line treatment is nearly as large as the original NSCLC population. And their situation is even more dire... After a brief search, I am not able to find a study showing these cancers are more associated with high HA but it makes sense since studies associate high HA in the original cancer with aggressiveness and recurrence. So, perhaps high HA is selected for in this population of platinum failures.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11241304

If is to be second line tx, Docetaxel makes sense as the partner drug:

http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/pdq/treatment/non-small-cell-lung/healthprofessional/page12

http://news.cancerconnect.com/docetaxel-may-prolong-survival-for-persons-with-metastatic-non-small-cell-lung-cancer-after-initial-therapy-fails/

At any rate, I certainly trust HALO and their advisors with this decision. They know what they are doing. If they get this indication, it will be huge source of revenues early on.


Outside of the lack of some big surprise, I thought the call went very well. The sell-off now is either manipulation, dumb money, or from illicit knowledge. I'm betting on a combination of the first two.