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David Southwell

๐Ÿ‘ค Speaker
275 total appearances

Appearances Over Time

Podcast Appearances

BioBoss
David Southwell: CEO of Volastra Therapeutics

One of the things that we've recently discovered is a biomarker that predicts patients that are gonna be, that are gonna respond to our drug.

BioBoss
David Southwell: CEO of Volastra Therapeutics

And the biomarker exists in well over 50% of the patients.

BioBoss
David Southwell: CEO of Volastra Therapeutics

So we can take, we can do a pan-cancer study and we actually used sub-therapeutic doses for some of these,

BioBoss
David Southwell: CEO of Volastra Therapeutics

You do a pan-cancer study that has an ORR rate that is not that good of, say, 14%.

BioBoss
David Southwell: CEO of Volastra Therapeutics

You then apply the biomarker to it and you get that up to 37.5%, which is much more interesting.

BioBoss
David Southwell: CEO of Volastra Therapeutics

So we are developing, you know, we started with a monotherapy.

BioBoss
David Southwell: CEO of Volastra Therapeutics

We then have found a biomarker for it and we're working very hard with that.

BioBoss
David Southwell: CEO of Volastra Therapeutics

with the objective of doing a pan-cancer pivotal trial with it.

BioBoss
David Southwell: CEO of Volastra Therapeutics

The other great thing about chromosomal instability is many of the standards of care promote, they create chromosomal instability.

BioBoss
David Southwell: CEO of Volastra Therapeutics

So, for example, taxanes, which are part of the first-line therapy of many cancers, including lung cancers, only have about a 10% to 15% response rate.

BioBoss
David Southwell: CEO of Volastra Therapeutics

In other words, the

BioBoss
David Southwell: CEO of Volastra Therapeutics

The tumor goes down by more than 30% in only 10 or 15% of cases.

BioBoss
David Southwell: CEO of Volastra Therapeutics

What we've found preclinically is that if you take a cell line that doesn't work with our drugs, so it's not particularly chromosomally unstable, you give our drug, nothing happens at all.

BioBoss
David Southwell: CEO of Volastra Therapeutics

You give a taxane, it has a little bit of an effect.

BioBoss
David Southwell: CEO of Volastra Therapeutics

But if you give both of them, you have a synergistic effect and it effectively flatlines the tumor.

BioBoss
David Southwell: CEO of Volastra Therapeutics

So we really have two approaches.

BioBoss
David Southwell: CEO of Volastra Therapeutics

One is a biomarker directed monotherapy approach, which would be used in third line therapy in a lot of different cancers.

BioBoss
David Southwell: CEO of Volastra Therapeutics

And our plan is to do a pan cancer study of that.

BioBoss
David Southwell: CEO of Volastra Therapeutics

And secondly, a combination strategy.

BioBoss
David Southwell: CEO of Volastra Therapeutics

where you would combine it with taxanes or ADCs.