Webinar breakdown - our take on IIQ’s promising cancer treatment
Our biotech Investment Inoviq (ASX: IIQ) hosted an investor webinar yesterday.
We think it was a really good deep dive into a frontier branch of medicine that could reshape the way the treatment of cancer works.
(It’s one of the key reasons we Invested in IIQ too)
For a bit of background, IIQ is a cancer diagnostics and therapeutics company developing an exosome platform technology.
Exosomes are tiny, microscopic extra-cellular “containers” released by ALL human cells.
Exosomes can carry ‘messages’ - clues as to whether or not someone has a disease - which is why IIQ has applied the platform tech to develop diagnostics products.
More recently though IIQ is moving into the therapeutics place to see if these "messengers" can be “weaponised” to locate and kill cancer cells.
Earlier this week IIQ announced a partnership with the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre to run studies on IIQ’s CAR-exosome therapy.
IIQ’s target is to develop a therapeutic that locates, targets and treats solid tumours (starting with Triple Negative Breast Cancer).
We covered that news in a note earlier in the week: IIQ pairs up with prestigious Peter Mac on potential breakthrough breast cancer research (with a string of catalysts to follow)
Yesterday’s webinar focused on IIQ’s therapeutics program and we found it very useful to understand what IIQ’s bigger picture vision is…
Check out the webinar here:
(Source)
Our key takeaways from the webinar:
Chief Scientific officer Greg Rice talked about the R&D priorities for the company.
He specifically talked about the two lead products IIQ has in development and the strengths of IIQ’s tech over other cell therapies.
1. On IIQ’s ovarian cancer screening test
First he talked about the ovarian cancer screening test.
IIQ will be reporting progress on the ovarian cancer test to the American Clinical Society for Oncology in June.
Expect an announcement in June regarding this.
Importantly, no ovarian cancer screening test has been approved yet.
IIQ’s test could solve that problem.
The challenge has always been developing a test with high enough specificity (how good the test is at identifying people with NO cancer).
For ovarian cancer, specificity required by clinicians (is a minimum of 99.6%) to minimise false positive rates.
2. On how IIQ’s therapeutic product could work better than cell CAR-T cell therapies for solid tumours.
Greg talked about how cell therapies have come a long way and work well with blood cancers BUT not so well with solid tumours.
He then talked about how IIQ can overcome some of the problems that CAR cell therapies might have so that solid tumours can be targeted.
A lot of similarities initially, but main difference = instead of reinjecting reprogrammed cells, IIQ isolates and collects the cancer killing exosomes and can take it one step further to develop Car-NK EV therapy.
IIQ can then inject that into patients.
He said that this approach could have some important scalability benefits over CAR-T cells because IIQ can give it to a larger cohort of patients whereas CAR-T is made on a per patient basis.
He laid out how it works in the following slide:
3. On IIQ’ Triple Negative Breast Cancer Therapeutic
Greg mentioned the first target for IIQ was Triple Negative Breast Cancer because there are no current approved cell therapies for it.
The main way of treating it at the moment is chemo.
This will be the focus of the work IIQ is doing with Peter Mac.
See our take on that here: IIQ pairs up with prestigious Peter Mac on potential breakthrough breast cancer research (with a string of catalysts to follow)
4. On Exosome’s therapeutic potential - at 10:25 Greg does a deep dive on how IIQ’s exosome tech works and why it can be applicable to therapeutics
5. On where IIQ has managed to take its therapeutic product - Greg starts talking about how much work IIQ has done to date and the results IIQ is getting from its early work on the “killing activity” of its exosomes in a lab. He talks specifically about how it is working with Triple Negative Breast Cancer and that IIQ have a “proof of concept”. This part starts at ~13:20 in to the webinar.
6. On IIQ’s work with Peter Mac - Greg talks about how Peter Mac will be taking IIQ’s proof of concept work and look to validate it (with lab trials) and then take it into mice models. Below is a slide from the webinar detailing the timeline of works on IIQ’s Triple Negative Breast Cancer therapy:
IIQ’s recently appointed medical and scientific advisory board member, the esteemed Professor Phil Darcy also ran through the program that is coming up with Peter Mac.
Phil is the group leader of the Cancer Immunotherapy Laboratory at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre and NHMRC Principal Research Fellow - a solid CV to have on IIQ’s advisory board.
Phil talks through IIQ’s platform tech and how it will be applied to solid tumours from 21:17 until about the ~26 minute mark.
Chief Commercial officer Dr Emma Ball was also introduced to investors on the call.
As we’ve mentioned previously, her background seems seriously impressive to us.
She has a background in commercialisation, business development, licensing, due diligence, negotiations and M&A.
Finally, CEO Leaarne Hinch ran through a slide on the deals happening in the exosome/cell therapies industry which gives us a pretty good overview of the size of the prize for IIQ.
Especially considering IIQ’s current market cap of ~$46M the following transactions give us a good idea of some of the potential deal values that could be involved if IIQ’s development work goes well:
What’s next for IIQ?
Here’s the rundown of future catalysts from IIQ’s latest presentation:
In particular we are looking forward to the following catalysts:
- 🔄Updates on solid tumour therapy in vivo studies (targeting Q4 of this year for in vivo results with Peter Mac)
- 🔄A lab partner for SubB2M tests (for breast cancer monitoring)
- 🔄Clinical validation studies for highly accurate ovarian cancer screening test
- 🔄Development of exosome diagnostic for neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson's.
