Or can you?
This phrase, which comes from the legendary writer, Dorothy Parker, best known for her wicked wit and caustic repartee, highlights how dogma, referring to a well-accepted belief or set of beliefs, is so firmly fixed as to be unalterable.
The dogma or unquestionably held tenet in oncology is not to retreat with a given therapy after disease progression on the assumption that resistance has irreversibly developed to it, which necessitates a different treatment plan.
However, EpicentRx lead therapies, RRx-001 (nibrozetone) and AdAPT-001, may one day soon overturn this firmly fixed dogma should clinical data incontrovertibly confirm, as long hypothesized, that their use reverses resistance to established therapies.
The small molecule, RRx-001, is currently in a Phase 3 clinical trial called REPLATINUM for the treatment of third-line or beyond small cell lung cancer (SCLC) to sensitize (or resensitize) patients to previously tried – and failed – platinum doublet chemotherapy.
Likewise, preliminary data from a Phase 2 trial suggests that the TGF-β-enhanced oncolytic adenovirus, AdAPT-001, makes it possible to rechallenge patients with the same checkpoint inhibitors to which they were previously resistant.
If only tumors could talk, we can imagine that they might exclaim that famous line from Dorothy Parker every time RRx-001 (nibrozetone) and AdAPT-001 are used against them to prevent or circumvent resistance pathways:
“What fresh hell is this?”