Scancell Holdings (LON: SCLP) (OTCPK: SCNLF) shares are up 25% today. The SCLP share price has jumped on the announcement of results about their melanoma treatment. Simply because medical testing does take many years, and has many potential failure points, we perhaps shouldn’t read to much into this. But it is a valuation point, this is value additive as well. It’s is a brick in that necessary wall of evidence to get to a saleable product.
The announcement: “Scancell Holdings plc (AIM: SCLP), the developer of novel immunotherapies for the treatment of cancer and infectious disease, announces positive data from the first stage in its Phase 2 SCOPE trial, investigating SCIB1 in combination with checkpoint inhibitors (CPIs) in advanced melanoma. Initial data from 11 patients showed an 82% objective response rate (ORR) to treatment, which is better than 70% ORR that the trial was configured to show.”
Medical testing has three major steps (there can be intermediates too). Phase I asks whether it kills healthy volunteers. Phase II - what is being done here - asks whether it actually works in curing something. Phase III looks at side effects and problems in a wider population. Which part of the testing is most important changes dependent upon what is the treatment for. Phase III is less important in an end stage cancer treatment, for example. Everyone will put up with larger side effects if the treatment actually cures the cancer.
Scancell Holdings share price from Google Finance
We looked before at Scancell: “Scancell Holdings shares are up 20% in London this morning. SCLP shares are up on the news of an expansion of the ModiFY tests. To those not already into Scancell that might not mean much - it means that the early stages of the tests went well enough that they're now being expanded. It's worth spending the cash on the larger test.” That’s a different test on a different form of cancer but operating along the same general lines. Can we modify the immune system to deal with cancers?
The answer, so far, appears to be yes. And Scancell is well along the road to proving it. Yes, there can be easier times in Phase III studies for cancer treatments - people die pretty swiftly without them after all. But there are still several years to go before this is likely to become a revenue earner. So don’t take these results as being indicative of imminent riches. There’s still a long road ahead.
