Not too long ago, we met Steve Young.
Not the Steve Young, mind you, the Hall of Famer who quarterbacked the legendary San Francisco 49ers to a Super Bowl in 1994, but another Steve Young. Steven Young, to be precise, who, from our perspective, quarterbacks a much more important organization as CEO of SARC (Sarcoma Alliance for Research through Collaboration).
Founded in 2003, SARC is the largest sarcoma-specific clinical trial collective that partners with 80+ cancer centers in the United States, along with 6 international centers to conduct mostly early phase clinical trials.
Sarcomas are a rare and diverse group of tumors that mainly arise from the soft tissues like the muscles and fat and less frequently from the bones. They account for less than 1 percent of adult cancers and approximately 15 percent of childhood cancers. Sarcomas are hard to diagnose, because of slow growth and nonspecific symptoms, and even harder to treat, as surgery is the only curative option and drug resistance followed by recurrence are, unfortunately, all too common.
We reached out to SARC over Zoom because of exciting, and possibly even practice-changing (🤞) results that include durable partial and complete responses, which we have observed in several sarcomas with our lead oncolytic adenovirus, AdAPT-001, plus a checkpoint inhibitor. AdAPT-001 expresses a transforming growth factor beta (TGF-β) trap that “traps” and neutralizes the overexpressed immunosuppressive protein, TGF-β, to stimulate an antitumor response.
EpicentRx hopes to partner with SARC, and to tap into their invaluable clinical trial expertise and extensive network of experienced investigators and key opinion leaders (KOLs) for help with the continued development of AdAPT-001 in sarcomas.
Now Steve Young, the NFL quarterback, was known for his running prowess, and, after our Zoom call, we would be willing to bet that the same is probably true of Steven Young and his organization, SARC. They seem to really know how to take an anticancer agent like AdAPT-001 and to run with it at full speed in hard-to-enroll sarcoma clinical trials.