Show and Tell

Apr 2, 2024

One of the most earnestly endearing collection of essays ever written is entitled, “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten” by the Unitarian minister and best-selling author, Robert Fulghum. The book published almost 40 years ago in 1986 but the life lessons it teaches, which come from lower not higher education, as the title states, are still relevant today.

These lessons, which it is safe to say Homer Simpson never learned, include:

  1. Play fair.
  2. Don’t hit people.
  3. Clean up your own mess.
  4. Don’t take things that aren’t yours.
  5. Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody.

One that should have made the list, but didn’t, is the useful K-1 exercise, show, and tell. Having been selected for a poster presentation, EpicentRx plans to show and tell at the 2024 American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) annual meeting on April 9th in San Diego, California, one of the most prestigious in oncology.

It’s one thing to talk about the very promising activity that we have seen with the lead EpicentRx therapy, AdAPT-001, it’s quite another thing to show it since patient imaging and photographs are worth much more than a thousand words.

Case in point are these photographs of a man with eccrine adenocarcinoma, tumors of the sweat glands, shown before (left) and after (right) treatment with AdAPT-001 in which the heel lesions completely disappear.

True for Hollywood, and doubly true for the pharmaceutical industry since images of clinical benefit are inherently much more persuasive than words, is the often-repeated maxim, “there’s no business, like show business”.