Tasquinimod

What is Tasquinimod? Tasquinimod is a new type of medicine that we hope will be effective for treating multiple myeloma. It's an oral medicine. It's been tried in other cancers before, specifically prostate cancer, and got all the way through to trials that showed that it did actually have an effect against prostate cancer, but just not quite good enough to get it approved. Based on laboratory work that was done by one of my colleagues at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, we think that Tasquinimod should work against multiple myeloma, especially in combination with other myeloma medications. And so we're conducting a trial at the University of Pennsylvania combining oral Tasquinimod with an all-oral combination of myeloma medicines, Ixazomib, also known as Ninlaro, lenalidomide, also known as Revlimid, and dexamethasone. And we're hoping that by working together with these other medications, and especially by blocking some of the pro-survival signals that the bone marrow microenvironment sends to myeloma cells, we can help these other medications work better and lead to better responses for myeloma. Our early results have been somewhat encouraging, and especially what we've seen is that although Tasquinimod can have some mild side effects, especially some achiness and mild gastrointestinal side effects, overall it seems to be pretty well tolerated, which matches the previous data seen in patients with other types of cancer. We're continuing to enroll to the clinical trial and are eager to see if Tasquinimod's promise holds out. So we're looking at Tasquinimod in combination with other standard myeloma medications for people with relapsed refractory myeloma who have been through most of the effective therapies that are already available. We think that Tasquinimod works by targeting the bone marrow microenvironment. So the idea is that myeloma cells, when they live in the bone marrow, find an especially welcoming home there. There are other cells in the bone marrow that send out pro-survival signals and growth signals and that suppress immune responses that would otherwise target the myeloma cells. We think that Tasquinimod blocks some of the signals sent out by a certain group of cells in the bone marrow that are particularly supportive, called myeloid-derived suppressor cells, and we hope that by blocking these signals we can make other treatments for myeloma work better.