At the AACR conference in San Diego, Drs. Tony Reid, CEO of EpicentRx, and Anthony P. Conley, a sarcoma specialist at MD Anderson Cancer Center (MDACC), spoke with Biotech TV about lead EpicentRx therapy, AdAPT-001, which is currently under investigation in a Dr. Conley-led Phase 2 clinical trial at MD Anderson.
During the interview, as you can probably hear in the clip below, a fire alarm sounded, which we interpret optimistically to mean that AdAPT-001 was too hot for AACR 🔥 😅.
As an oncolytic virus that expresses a transforming growth factor-beta (TGF-β) trap which eliminates the immunosuppressive cytokine, TGF-β, AdAPT-001 makes cold 🧊🥶or non-immunogenic tumors hot 🔥 🥵 or inflamed especially when it is combined with a checkpoint inhibitor.
Cool characters that they are, Drs. Reid and Conley didn’t “sweat” the interruption and continued unperturbed with the interview.
If they had been sitting instead of standing, we could have (and most certainly would have) called it a “hot seat” interview even though fortunately no fire was present!