Become a RACist

The below is a short bit of DD on RAC based on something I wrote up in response to u/matt_step in the daily yesterday. I thought it might be of interest to some others here. The drug bisantrene was approved for use in acute myeloid leukemia back in the late 1980s. It was thought to be a chemotherapeutic, yet it did not cause the heart damage typical of chemo. Its big issue is that it crystalised in the blood. RAC reformulated bisantrene, and their isomer e,e-bisantrene resolves that problem. The reason I bought in is because the mechanism of action was revealed to be Myc inhibition through G4 binding. Discovering a Myc inhibitor has been a kind of holy grail in cancer research. There are 50,000 publications on PubMed about Myc… And it seems like one was an inhibitor right under everyone’s noses for decades. Because bisantrene has already been on market, it is significantly clinically derisked in terms of safety and so on. They are trying to get approval for AML, which it has already been approved for. There is a current phase 3 bridging study for AML – which, as I noted, bisantrene has been approved for in the past. US FDA has granted orphan drug designation to e,e-bisantrene for AML. But AML isn't the big market. There is enormous potential to use e,e-bisantrene alongside the most popular existing chemotherapeutics treatments as a cardioprotective. Up to 15% of chemo survivors go on to develop full-blown heart-failure, and many others have cardiotoxicity that can limit both the dosing and duration of their treatment. There is also enormous potential to use it alongside tyrosine kinase inhibitors to prevent TKI resistance (which is a massive problem and a major cause of treatment failure). The below animal data (from TKI resistant mice) was published a couple of days ago. It would be of huge value to AstraZeneca (who make Tagrisso/osimertinib), who are seen as a potential bidder. https://preview.redd.it/t2yobe55vtdg1.png?width=940&format=png&auto=webp&s=ea610077551fca3444be716f53af15cfcbbfb4c8 But the big one in terms of potential market is lung cancer. There is a non-small cell lung cancer trial that is just starting. The trials are making use of ctDNA, so clinical validation of Myc inhibition could happen early in current trials. But even more excitingly, they were taking RNA in one of the existing trials, and one of the sharpest investors confirmed at the AGM that the validation could come out of existing data. I think they are being circumspect about it at the moment because they do not have the composition of matter patents yet. The CEO is by far the largest shareholder, and has committed to not selling a single share before RAC is bought out. Despite having an average of about 15c a share, he has recently bought $58k and $31k on market. The idea here is to get a bidding war started between big pharmas with looming patent expiries etc. If you're interested in valuations, Merck is looking at buying Revolution Medicines for US$32bn for its RAS inhibitor. It is not an approved drug, RAS is not nearly as significant as Myc, and it also has competitors in the RAS space, while e,e-bisantrene is effectively the only Myc inhibitor in the clinical pipeline.