Interview with Thomas Jensen, Co-Founder & CEO of Allarity Therapeutics

Good afternoon and welcome to today's interview with Oxford Global. A very warm welcome to Thomas Jensen, Co-Founder and CEO of Allarity Therapeutics, who's kindly joined us for today's interview. Thank you very much and welcome, Thomas. 

 
Thanks for having me. 

 
OK, so if we could start with the first question, Thomas, you co-founded Allarity Therapeutics and have served in a range of leadership roles before becoming CEO. How has your journey within the company shaped the vision and direction of Allarity today? 
 
So, I think that it's a good question. I think all of these various roles has helped me understand more deeply. First, of course, what goes on inside a company like ours. All the years spent building the lab and getting that input helped the scientific side from the molecular biology side all the way to the DRP. But then also all, all the years I have spent meeting investors, talking about Allarity and its predecessors help me gain a good understanding of what investors think and what's important to them and general ideas in the marketplace. So, I think all around it has, it has given me a broad base to build Allarity from. 

 
Fantastic. Thank you very much Thomas. Your early work on molecular biological guidelines and RNA extraction techniques laid the foundation for the Drug Response Predictor platform. Can you tell us about this innovation and its importance in precision oncology? 

Yes, I think now more than ever it it's important to understand the nature of your data, the basis of your data. If you get junk into your system, your output will also be junk. So understanding what data you can trust and what you cannot trust is crucial if you want to build a big platform. Some of the challenges we've seen with a lot of these very expensive methodologies that has surfaced is that that they have not really improved much because the data turned out not to be as useful as it could be. But for us it has it has really shaped the DRP in in order for us to very early on when we get data in, can we, can we trust it? Can we not trust it? So that's the most important thing, I think. 

 
Fantastic. Thank you. So Allarity Therapeutics is leveraging the proprietary DRP technology to redefine patient selection and improve outcomes. How does this approach stand apart from the traditional methods of patient stratification? 

 
I will say that the DRP provides a richer understanding of the multitude of complex events within a cancer tissue that simple genetic mutation-based means of stratification or selection just cannot provide. 

Thank you very much.Stenoparib is a dual PARP and Tankyrase inhibitor currently in development. Could you share more about the rationale behind advancing this therapy and what makes it unique in the treatment of difficult-to-treat cancers? 

 
 
Sure. So there are a lot of things to consider here, but, but let me just give you a quick run through. First of all, safety appears to be better than the first generation PARPs with very low rates of myelotox - that makes it easier for patients to stay on treatment and that also positions us so that as the combination PARP of choice and you can see that, that this is reflected in our soon to open trial where we combined Synapta with temozolomide. There have been attempts at combining temozolomide with PARPs, but the prior attempts of this combination with temozolomide have showed remarkable response rates. But the stax myelotox of both agents was difficult for patients to take. So, so the wind pathway inhibition is key here. Wind is activated in many advanced cancers, and it's also associated with chemo and radio resistant disease, as well as advanced metastatic disease. The wind activation allows cancers to have an adaptability. You can see a plasticity that allows these advanced cancers to evade a wide swath of therapeutics. Wind activation also helps set up an immune microenvironment that favours progression. So we're staying restraining the width pathway with Synapta may provide the lingering benefit of our current trial or at least what it seems to provide. It's a durability that now has as we have shown very, very recently, it has provided us with an impressive median overall survival that has not yet reached the end point. But it now exceeds 25 months. And you see that you can say that this link during benefit that we think we are seeing and the extended OS of nearly a year beyond the best recent advances for these patients. It may well reflect restraint of the wind pathway. And this is a unique feature to Stenoparib. 

Thank you very much. At our upcoming Biomarkers and Precision Medicine 2025 event, we're delighted to have you presenting on a gene expression-based biomarker for predicting response to stenoparib. So, can you give us a little bit of a preview of the key findings and goals of this research please? 

 
Yeah, again, thanks for having me present. I'm really looking forward to it. So I'll be talking more in depth about the drug response predictor and what it has allowed us to see, to learn, in the Synapta ovarian cancer trial. I will be showing swimmers plots of the nature of the patients and how they have done on treatment, as well as giving some more in-depth information about the building of the DRP. 

 
Fantastic. Really looking forward to your presentation. You mentioned that validation of this response predictor is ongoing in a clinical trial. What are some of the key milestones you're looking to achieve with the study? 

 
So the new trial is expressly designed to solidify our cut point, the DRP score, the DRP score that we will intend to use to enrol patients on the registrational trial we'll design. 

 
Fantastic, thank you very much. So looking back at Allarity’s journey, what achievements or breakthroughs are you most proud of so far in advancing personalised cancer care? 

 
I would say that the current success is the highlight. Women who otherwise had no remaining good options have now gotten to see multiple Christmases, birthdays, the birth of new grandchildren. This drug has already enhanced the lives of our patients and I'm deeply excited that we'll get the chance to extend this benefit to even more people and not just ovarian cancer patients, but patients with a variety of malignancies like lung cancer and colorectal cancers. 

 
Fantastic, That's brilliant. Thank you very much. So precision oncology is a rapidly evolving field, but obviously not without its challenges. What hurdles have you faced in developing stenoparib and the DRP platform and how have you worked to overcome these challenges? 

 
So there are a lot of the of the same struggles that that all clinical development companies have like finding the right patient population, the getting the right patients on finding the right centres.  We now have a very great clinical team at hands at hand that has really refined our clinical approach and our clinical approach and crystallised the patient population. We have launched a new clinical trial in ovarian cancer and also, we have now the small cell lung cancer with the VA administration in a combination with tamosolamide. And you can say the timing and execution is everything for a company like ours. We have to understand the CDX and we have to understand the molecule. Stenoparib was born as a power inhibitor, but it really is more of a differentiated molecule and as a consequence of this, it has the potential for long term Disease Control and we're really exploring that option. 

 
Great, thank you very much. And then just turning attention to collaborations and partnerships. So collaborations has been key to Allarity’s growth, from in-licence therapeutics to building global laboratory capabilities. How have these partnerships and cross-disciplinary teamwork supported your progress. 

 
It gives us a lot of new insights. It gives us access to new therapies. It helps us fund what we do as well. So, it has, I think it really helps us build enterprise value and position us uniquely in the field. And we are constantly on the hunt for, for good collaborations that can leverage the DRP. 

 
Absolutely thank you. And lastly, as you look ahead, what excites you most about the future of precision oncology and what role do you see Allarity playing in shaping that future? 

 
I think that a lot of the IT, it is no longer the Wild West in precision oncology as it, as it used to be, the first attempts many, many moons ago with finding a mutated gene or something similar to that guided treatment decision that worked in very few cases and a lot of money has been poured into that. But I think now we're at a place to take some quantum leaps forward with technologies like ours and also what AI can bring. And I am thrilled to see the data that stenoparib provides together with the DRPI think, of course, stenoparib has a very good future ahead of it. But I also strongly believe that the DRP equally has that with molecules from some of our collaborators that leverage the DRP. 

 
But also one could, could think that in the future, Allarity might also have other molecules of its own to work on. So, I think the future is bright. And I think for cancer patients, of course, a lot of these diseases, will be some diseases they will die with and not die of. At least that's my hope. The earlier we detect the cancer, the higher the probability of them getting rid of their cancer, of course. But for a lot of these advanced diseases, I think that that we will probably not cure them, not in the next, in the next years, but we will. We will hopefully make them. Yeah, live with the disease and not die because of the disease. 

 
Absolutely. Thank you very much. And with that, we will close today's interview. Thank you so much again, Thomas, for your time and for sharing such fantastic insights on the really significant and pioneering work that's going on at Allarity Therapeutics. I am delighted to share that Thomas is a confirmed speaker for our upcoming Biomarkers and Precision Medicine 2020 event. So if you would like to find out more, please come find us and Thomas in London on the 30th of September to the 1st of October to be part of Europe's flagship event for biomarker innovation, advancing drug discovery, development, clinical trials and precision medicine. 

 
So we look forward to seeing you there. Thomas, thank you very much again for your time today. 

 
Thank you. Likewise, it's been a pleasure.