Dr. Stella Vnook, Co-Founder and Executive Chair of Kaida Biopharma, highlights the advantages for an early-stage biotech company to take a patient-centric perspective in drug development. She defines patient-centricity as focusing on whether a drug meaningfully improves a patient's life, which should influence decisions about trial design, endpoints, and side effects from the earliest stages. Kaida's work on a new treatment for ovarian cancer is designed to target tumor survival mechanisms and overcome treatment resistance, and has from the beginning taken into consideration the tolerability of treatments and the patient's quality of life.

Stella explains, "We're so used to thinking drug-centric, and it's true that in the early stages of development, it's all about the molecule and the mechanism of action, and it's exciting to see how it works. But we really need to be thinking patient-centric because we will make decisions differently from the start. So it's not just about whether this drug works and how, but whether it meaningfully changes a patient's life. I think that's what patient-centric is or should be, because that would impact trial design, endpoints, and how we view tolerability or combination therapy."

"For ovarian cancer, women today may receive a variety of treatments. Now, let's talk about this for a second. It's the cancer that's usually diagnosed very late. That means the patient's tumor has already gone into the lymph nodes, and it's what we call a stage three PO4. The patients after surgery receive a variety of drugs such as platinum therapies or PARP, but they still may relapse, and they may become resistant to the therapy. Now, that initial therapy has probably had significant toxicity. Because they've become resistant to the therapy they received, now they have limited options. So fortunately, there are drugs that potentially could be eligible for FRA positive. There's been a lot of news about ELAHERE, which is great, but it's only 25% of the population, and many patients may never qualify for this treatment. So that's where Kaida comes in, because we're focusing on 80% of the population."

"Actually, the name Kaida is a dragon that eats its own tail. So that talks about the mechanism of action we've discussed: resistance. What we do is when the treatment has been given, it supports cell survival and actually eliminates the tumor's ability to replicate, which is called proliferation, causing it to destroy itself, which is called apoptosis. So in essence, the tumor disrupts itself because we're cutting off its support system."

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