R.J. Tesi
Analyst · Tailwinds Research. Please proceed with your question.
Yes. Thanks, Dan. The main difference is that we think the patients of NK cells are just fine. And what I mean by that, they have all the guns, knives and missiles, the thing you need to kill cancer cells, but they're apathetic or they're blind, for whatever reason, do not attack the cancer cells. Actually, we know the reason, it's actually the cancer has figured out a way to avoid the immune surveillance that NK cells do. But it turns out, if you flip that switch, that odd switch, you can turn that NK cell from an apathetic NK cell into a cancer killing machine. Now, there's a number of ways to do this. You can do it with cytokines IL-2, IL-15. They actually turn the NK cell on. You can do it with INKmune. We have shown in the public work that I mentioned that those are not equivalent. It turns out when you turn it with INKmune, you up regulated some very specific, shall we say, cell showing bits of cell killing machinery that you don't do with you turn them on with cytokines. Furthermore, the cytokines have to be present as soon as you remove the cytokines from the environment, those NK cells go back to sleep. That's certainly a problem with many of the companies that actually think that you need to replace the NK cells. So just to reinforce, all of our competitors as far as we can tell, actually thinks that the patient's NK cells aren't good enough, they’re diseased. And hence, you’ve got to get new ones. Now, we admit there are some patients that just after being beat up with chemotherapy just don't have enough NK cells. And yes, you must replace those NK cells, but that's a minority of cancer patients. Most cancer patients have normal amounts of NK cells. In fact, NK cells come storming back after the leukopenia associated with chemotherapy. They're the first lymphocyte population to come back. So, when they come back, they're still -- so, we've turn them on. So we are different. We are not giving NK cells. We depend on the patient's NK cells. We think there's ample support. I mean remember Genentech built a franchise based on rituximab and Herceptin, which is turning on the patient's own NK cells to treat lymphoma and breast cancer respectively. So, we think Genentech got it right, and we just think we have a better way to do it.