May 12, 2015
Fire Up the Immune System to Fight Cancers and Boost Portfolios
By John McCamant
An immunotherapy revolution is rocking biotechnology, and investors are searching for just the right way to play the new trend. Do you go with an unknown company where the upside could be unparalleled? Do you go with an older name that has established partnerships with major pharmas? John McCamant, editor of The Medical Technology Stock Letter, has performed some serious diligence, and tells The Life Sciences Report about a handful of names with a range of market caps and the potential to achieve significant investment upside.
The Life Sciences Report: You’re quite well aware that investors are looking hard at immunotherapeutics in oncology today. Do you think these initiatives to employ cellular and humoral responses in cancer therapies could be the final frontier, to use a dramatic term?
John McCamant: You never know where you’ve been until after the fact. But major breakthroughs in understanding different components of immune response to cancer, and how the cancer itself can affect different pathways in the body, are being made. We’re getting more tools. So far we’ve been very focused on killing tumors, but now we understand how to perhaps prevent recurrence via immune surveillance. The ability to reprogram or turn back the immune system is changing the paradigm in cancer treatment.
TLSR: For many years now the first line of attack against cancers has been via the cytotoxic route. It seems we always start with chemo-therapies, which actually work against the immune system. I wonder if you think these chemo/cytotoxic therapies might decrease the effectiveness of the immune therapies being developed.
JM: Possibly. More research on that topic is coming out of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR). My focus right now is to look at some of the newer agents that could make cytotoxic therapies more effective, and also minimize their side effects. We may not completely eliminate cytotoxic drugs, because when they do work they have very strong effectiveness. But we might find ways to use them much more effectively, in lower doses with less toxicity.
“Cellular Biomedicine Group Inc. is a recently transformed company.“
Another point I’d like to make is that sometimes these drugs will be sequenced. We’ll end up using multiple oncology drugs, and one of the keys we may see come out of AACR is how to use these drugs in certain combinations. Down the road, we believe three- or four-drug combinations may be used, so safety is going to be very, very important. Combinability, as you know, is really tricky. It’s hard enough to make sure one molecule is safe, but two molecules can be even trickier.
TLSR: Is it fair to say that immune technologies are still nascent ideas as drug therapy?
JM: Some yes, some no. Some PD-1 and PD-L1 inhibitors are approved now. Merck & Co. Inc.’s (MRK:NYSE) PD-1 inhibitor Keytruda (pembrolizumab), a monoclonal antibody, was granted accelerated approval last September. It was the first PD-1-blocking drug to be approved. The big pharmas are dominating the PD-1 and PD-L1 inhibitor class of drugs, and we don’t see a lot of investment opportunities there, but we’ve been able to identify other investment opportunities, specifically in companies like Incyte Corp. (INCY:NASDAQ), which is combining its small molecule IDO inhibitor epacadostat with proteins from the larger companies. Incyte’s drug is currently in a bunch of proof-of-concept trials that will be in registration trials within 12 months.
TLSR: These new immunotherapeutic drugs will be considered first-generation therapeutics, right?