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Comment by oneoff786 | Hacker News Reader

Intellectual curiosity

It would be nice if the article said which experimental drug was used.

The article doesn't give details, but one of the quoted authors has participated in trials testing anti-ICOS antibody alone or in combination with atezolizumab, with results presented at an ASCO meeting: https://ascopubs.org/doi/abs/10.1200/JCO.2021.39.15_suppl.26...

Describes one complete response in TNBC (and 4 partial responses in TNBC and other cancers). Couldn't find a related peer-reviewed journal article on very quick search.

I have not heard of anti-ICOS (Inducible costimulatory receptor) before. Seems specific to TME.

KY1044 with mouse models (different authors):

https://aacrjournals.org/cancerimmunolres/article/8/12/1568/...

KY1044 I think is Kymab in Cambridge:

https://www.kymab.com/pipeline/ky1044/

Yes, Sanofi licensed from Kymab. There are a few groups targeting ICOS/ICOSL to modulate immune response to tumor (either alone or in combo with PD-1, CTLA-4, etc approaches previously mentioned on HN). Here's one reasonably recent backgrounder on rationale: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7003380/

Still not clear that KY1044 really is the "experimental drug" mentioned in the linked BBC article, since as others have noted the article is pretty thin on detail.

It does. It's right there. Did you read the article?

It doesn't. Did _you_ read the article?

> an experimental medicine combined with Atezolizumab, an immunotherapy drug.

Atezolizumab is not the experimental drug, it's an already approved drug. The drug in question is the unnamed drug it was combined with.

Huh. It was there earlier. I can't remember what it said, a something-mab, so monoclonal antibody. I wonder why the BBC did a wee ninja-edit? Legal reasons?

Yes.

> experimental medicine combined with Atezolizumab, an immunotherapy drug

Atezolizumab is an approved anti-PD-L1 monoclonal antibody. What’s the experimental medicine?

Seems to have been ninja-edited. It was there earlier.

A monocolony antibody.

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