In this Pharmaceutical Executive video interview, Panna Sharma, CEO, Lantern Pharma, talks about ensuring global access to LP-284, particularly in regions with limited resources
With an estimated 40,000-80,000 potential annual beneficiaries worldwide, how will you go about ensuring global access to LP-284, particularly in regions with limited resources?
One thing I think that's really unique about this drug in particular non Hodgkins lymphoma (NHL) is we're in an era now, where NHLs with recurrent, especially recurrent, are being treated with fairly expensive regimens, Carty therapy by specific antibodies, things that are very hard to pronounce, they don't have three or four syllables anymore, they have six to nine syllables. And so every syllable, you're adding another $100,000, I feel like in the pharma world, but you know, those are not affordable drugs. This is a small molecule, we can make this at small molecule level prices. And again, it's a brand new drug, the drug never been even, you know, had a concept of it, you know, four or five years ago. We think that it can be widely available, easily produced and distributed using the same molecule, small molecule machinery that all the big farmers have. So we think there's going to be a lot of interest, especially places where it's difficult to do Carty, where it's difficult to whether it's an autologous or allogeneic. And by specifics are really expensive to produce and distribute, and there's a lot of cold chain issues, etc. So we think this is a drug that has shown pretty equivalent, if not superior, preclinical data to some of the cutting edge therapies being used. Again, that's preclinical, but showing preclinical to preclinical if you've got pretty equivalent data monotherapy, and actually better data in combination. I think that's a great starting place.
And our cost of making this drug is a decimal place different than most biologics. I mean, the farmers are addicted to burning cash. And so there's no there's no incentive to try to do things cheaper, unless you're a small company that has no money, every shot that we take has to count. And so, when we designed to eight, four, we looked at the manufacturing process and said, How can we piggyback on the pharmacophores of 184 for its sister molecule? By doing that, it allowed us to really skip through a whole series of some synthesis, and steps and, and do some kind of separation later on down. And we actually, you know, we think we can actually make that more efficient, actually, the next go round.
It's very exciting because one, we want to make drugs cheaper, that's kind of our core mission is to make them more precise, and to make them more efficiently. And I think this is a great case study for that. And that's why we're particularly excited. And we're also going to extend to a for the next round in in combination therapy. So, we've published on this and one of the Mainstays and non Hodgkins lymphoma as you probably know in your readers or viewers, is rituximab, and we've published on 284. Plus, rituximab in combination shows remarkable efficacy, even much better than monotherapy of either drug alone, and we can cut the dose even in half and have even a better window for the for the combination regimen. So, we're pretty excited by that. And we're going to do you know, probably that in a phase one beast slash to probably Phase II combination, we'll probably do a combination of the rituximab and 284 as a safety role and then go to a full combination trial versus 184 alone and see how that does. So again, the avenues because it's so well molecularly characterized, we've got a number of publications. We think it opens us up to actually other diseases outside of cancer. So like I mentioned before, this is a really potent B cell depleted and so B cells play a role in a number of autoimmune conditions as well. And we wouldn't be the first company looking to partner this asset with some of the big autoimmune players to looking at some of those kinds of diseases.
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