How Cancer Uses an “Invisibility Cloak” - And How Kazia Therapeutics Is Trying to Remove It

Well, let's talk for a moment about the pathway before we talk about, get back to PAX, your lead asset, because you're targeting the PI3K mTOR pathway, right? And we have products that target that, right? So tell me a little bit about that pathway and what's unique about PAX and why you see such promise in targeting that pathway.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's a great question.

So the PI3K pathway is a real critical pathway, both for normal cells, but also in particular for cancer cells.

And the way I would look at it, a great sort of explanation that we've used is the PI3K pathway is an accelerator.

It is what cancer cells to accelerate their growth.

It's also an accelerator in terms of how they can be resistant to current therapies.

So by that accelerator being stuck in the on position, you know, pedal to the metal sort of thing, these cancer cells will grow and grow and grow and they'll develop resistance.

So this pathway is one of the ones that cancer cells essentially use to exist.

They use to essentially grow and expand and metastasize.

So by hitting the target, the PI3K target, we're essentially taking that stuck accelerator and removing it.

Now, here's the thing.

So as you know, you take the accelerator and take your foot off the accelerator, what happens? The car is still moving forward.

So the cancer cells are still growing.

Well, how are they growing? Because they're bypassing the PI3K.

They're going on and using something else or going forward.

So by targeting both PI3K and mTOR, not only are you taking the foot off the accelerator, but you're also putting the brakes on so actually you come to right the idea of taking the accelerator off is to slow down eventually to really stop so by hitting both of these two pathways both pi 3k and mtor with the same molecule you actually start slowing down the growth right and that's exactly probably the best metaphor that i think really explains the pathway

That's a great metaphor.

I'm visualizing it.

And I think that's a great way to think about how you're targeting that cancer growth pathway.