In the Empowered Patient Podcast with Karen Jagoda, Jeff Glazier, CEO of General Oncology, discusses GO-4, General Oncology’s investigational cancer therapy.
Listen to the podcast here.
Download a transcript of the podcast here.
In the podcast, he states: “We’re actually taking a different approach than a lot are. And I would say there are really two approaches, there are two different things on. We have a clinical trial right now where we’re using old chemotherapy drugs in a new way, and when you combine them together, you really get a different result. We’re trying to shut down DNA repair and kill cancer cells, but the other really interesting thing, and I think it underlines General Oncology’s vision, is old chemotherapy drugs long ago had very broad action, and with broad action comes unwanted incidental toxicity. And over the years, there’s been huge push in the industry for moving towards specific drugs that target specific things and have less incidental toxicity. The unfortunate side effect, I should say result of that, is that cancer cells can evolve around a drug if there’s too much specificity. So we’re taking a pretty novel approach with our business of going after drugs that have broad action, but we found a way, we believe, to do it in a way that doesn’t have incidental toxicity.”
He adds: “I certainly feel that you want to have more than one attack. If you only do one, the cancer cells can evolve around it. The drug resistance approach I was referring to was what we call GO-4, it’s what’s in our clinical trial, and we are altering part of the cancer cells’ fundamental biology that is involved in DNA repair and shutting it down. But we are doing it in more than one way.”