They were not going to raise but did as obviously big investors...

They were not going to raise but did as obviously big investors wanted in. This could really be something special over the next 12 months. An old article but explains how we are targeting 75% of breast cancer patients that don't respond to chemotherapy. Ptx with a 25million cap and 12-13 million in the bank is the best risk/reward bio tech on the asx...



Australian-listed drug developer Prescient Therapeutics is aggressively progressing trials on a treatment it believes will double the response rate in breast cancer patients.



Prescient’s chief scientific officer, professor Said M. Sebti, said only 25 per cent of women with locally advanced breast cancer responded to chemotherapy, while 75 per cent did not. “There is an unmet need to discover a drug for those (that don’t respond),” he said.

“Our hope is that by adding (our drug candidate) PTX-200 to standard chemotherapy we could help some of the 75 per cent of the women that don’t respond.”

Professor Sebti, also chair of drug discovery at the Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute in the US, said the company was looking to double the response rate of women with breast cancer. “If we can increase the response rate to 50 per cent, we would consider that to be a huge success,” he said. “Imagine how many women have breast cancer and we can double that response rate — it would be considered a big success.”

Professor Sebti, one of the original founders of the drug candidates Prescient is developing, said the company had similar hopes, targets and milestones with ovarian cancer and leukaemia.

The Melbourne-based oncology firm says the two novel compounds it is developing show promise as potential therapies to treat a range of cancers that have become resistant to front line chemotherapy.

Lead drug candidate, PTX-200, inhibits an important tumour survival pathway known as AKT, which plays a key role in the development of many cancers, including breast and ovarian cancer, as well as leukaemia. PTX-200 targets 40 per cent of human cancers, while the company’s other drug candidate, PTX-100 targets 30 per cent. The company has an uncommon story in the Australian biotech space with drug discovery out of Yale University and the University of South Florida being farmed into the local company.

Professor Sebti said the drug candidates had previously not been in good hands. “In Australia they are in the good hands of executive director Paul Hopper and his team,” he said. “I couldn’t have put this in better hands is the way I feel about it.”

Mr Hopper said there were not many Australian biotech companies running three human trials for new drug candidates.

The company is funded for its trials and is not looking to raise funds. “We are recruiting as many patients as we can as fast as we can to get the data and analyse it and that will give us a clear indication of how the drug has gone and we push on from there,” Mr Hopper said.

“Most of the extension of life that approved cancer drugs are giving is marginal. If you had a drug that prolonged a life by six or seven months in some of these really nasty cancers that would be an outstanding success.

“That doesn’t sound much but when you’re at the end of your life an extra six months is nice to have, particularly if the drugs aren’t going to make you feel sick. Our drugs don’t appear to have a toxic profile.”