We’ve reached peak word salad. 🤞 Much in the news of late, the term, word salad, was originally reserved for the rambling/disordered/incomprehensible speech patterns of those with real medical conditions like schizophrenia, aphasia, or dementia, but now its use has crossed over to the political arena. A TV commentator and political operative recently coined the memorable term, “word salad city”, to describe a lack of semantic fluidity.
An operative that inhabits “non-word salad city” is lead EpicentRx therapy, AdAPT-001. Its commands to tumors in the language of DNA are refreshingly concise and to-the-point.
The first command to them is “Die!,” which it accomplishes through lysis or bursting of tumor cells.
The second command is “Make transforming growth factor beta (TGFβ) trap.” When AdAPT-001, as an oncolytic adenovirus, infects cancer cells, it uses them as factories to make more virus particles and TGFβ trap. This trap not only neutralizes the immunosuppressive cytokine, TGFβ, but also suppresses the activity of a deleterious cell type known as cancer associated fibroblasts, (CAFs).
The third command is “Immune system, ramp up and attack the tumors.” This command is often given with a type of therapy called an immune checkpoint inhibitor that rallies T-cells to the anticancer cause. Several patients that have received the combination of AdAPT-001 plus a checkpoint inhibitor developed strikingly durable partial and complete responses, which is exciting and gratifying to see.
In any event, let’s go offline and circle back on this topic soon, hopefully to crystallize our thought process, and discuss metrics so we can align our synergies and look holistically at what we can do together, holistically, to make these results even better. 😉