skitahoe

The "Naked" Truth About Antibodies For Cancer Therapy

I believe IMGN's latest guidance is for 2 to 4 drugs by June 2008, the end of their fiscal year. Eight targets currently are licensed to IMGN's partners, and the CEO has guided that SNY will claim at least ten targets to license from IMGN's pipeline by the end of August, 2008. By the end of 2009 the potential of going substantially higher than 4 to 6 new drugs is great.

Something we have almost no knowledge of is just how much work has been done preclinically since the SNY partnership took place. We know SNY has a choice of up to 20 targets from IMGN's pipeline, and that the choice was from 40 or more targets in the pipeline. If over the five years of the partnership many of these 20 to 40 targets they've been looking at have advanced substantially preclinically, by the end of 2009 either IMGN or SNY may put one or more of these in the clinic. Today we know of at least one that SNY intends to bring to the clinic as it appears on SNY's website, even though the drug's not yet licensed with IMGN.

I hope everyone knows when I'm referring to a target it actually represents potentially many different drugs. PSMA was the target IMGN licensed with MLNM, who also had the rights to J591 an MAB developed by BZL which targets it. There are other MAB's that also target PSMA, IMGN won't license them as long as MLNM holds the target rights. While MLN2704 didn't go to Phase II, it was a conjugate of J591 with DM1 with one of IMGN's oldest linkers. Today IMGN could conjugate that MAB with different linkers as well as different effector molecules. It could also conjugate other MAB's targeted at PSMA, but only for MLNM, or if MLNM agreed to sell or abandon its license with IMGN. No one outside the partnered companies seem to know how long licenses are for, so it's also possible that in time they expire if drugs are not being actively pursued from the license.

I believe that Tras-DM1 could be the first approved TAP drug, though there are other possibilities. As I see it, ten or twenty years from now DNA could come back to IMGN and improve on the drug with a better linker, effector molecule, or both, as I don't believe the license would expire just because a drug was approved from it.

These are just my opinions, but I've been invested in the company almost from the beginning.

Gary