[메디게이트뉴스 배진건 칼럼니스트] In March, the energy of spring is clear. Mid-season comes, and you can enjoy more spring. Enjoying March, the American Association of Cancer Research (AACR) always follows the path of spring. My relationship with AACR was in 1982 at the University of Wisconsin’s College of Pharmacy with a Ph. It goes back to the time when he received D. and moved to the McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research on the same Madison campus.
The Malt Cancer Research Institute was the leading research center for AACR at the time. In 1950, of the seven founding professors of Malt, Professor Jim & Elizabeth Miller and his wife, Professor Boutwell and my Post Doc supervisor Dr. Mueller He served in the fall of 1982 when I started Podak. In addition, Nobel laureate Professor Howard Temin, Paul Berg’s graduate student Janet E Mertz, who is called the “mother of Restriction Enzyme,” and the director of liver cancer expert Henry Pitot. Henry C. Pitot) served as a professor.
My mentor Professor Mueller served as AACR President from 1982 to 1983, and I made my first attendance at the 74th Cancer Research Society held at the Town & Country Hotel in San Diego in the spring of 1983, when my term of office was over. done. At that time, the relatively small American Society of Clinical Oncologist (ASCO) first started on Sunday and ended on Wednesday, and the AACR was designed to start on Wednesday and set Wednesday as the common denominator of the two societies. Therefore, it was from Wednesday, May 25th to Saturday, May 28th.
I have been a regular member of AACR since 1983, and my membership number is 5661. I think it’s a pretty fast number for Koreans. Thanks to that fast membership number, he hosted annual AACR Korean meetings. In 2001, I was the first foreign scholar to serve as the chairman of AACR, and thanks to the late Dr. Hong Wan-gi, who had been conducting cancer research at the MD Anderson Cancer Center for a long time, several people who were training in the room also attended this meeting. When I was about 15 years old, I remember telling Mr. Jong-Sik Lim, who was a senior and the chairman,’I am now too old to take off this position’ and transferred it to someone else.
The fact that the scale of AACR and ASCO is getting bigger is that it has become a world-class mammoth conference. Starting in 1998, the AACR Annual Meeting is held in various parts of the United States in April of each year, and the ASCO is held in Chicago, United States in June of each year, with over 20,000 attendees annually. However, in the spring of 2020, the 111th conference will be held non-face-to-face and will be divided into April and May. Thanks to Corona 2021’Week1: April 10-15; Week2: May 17-21′ is divided into a non-face-to-face session.
On March 11th, a post titled’AACR 2021 Domestic Biotech Poster Abstract’ was posted on Facebook. “I looked at the vast AACR abstracts, and when a Korean company stood out, I was happy to organize them one by one,” wrote “Park Byung-jun”. Who is this person? Since last year, I got to know the name through a posting that attracted attention on Facebook. In particular, many posts about clinical data were noticeable, so I thought this was a young doctor I didn’t know.
However, looking at his post on March 9, I learned that there is a YouTube video that says,’How should I understand OLIPASS’ non-narcotic analgesic candidate OLP-1002 clinical trial 1b in Australia?’ After all, it was a YouTuber. A YouTuber who sees clinical results differently from an objective standpoint through’Gasingil TV’, a guide to new drugs for value investment, and in a more wonderful word,’Creator’. There was also a reason to organize the Olipass information so quickly. Just a few days before the new situation happened, an interview with Ms. Jeong was posted on YouTube.
Strangely, I love drama very much, but I am not a person who enjoys watching videos while visiting a smartphone. So I didn’t treat YouTube well, but I couldn’t pass over the clinical news of Olipass. Because Olipass’s CEO, Dr. Jeong Min, has a common denominator of’Schering Prau’ with me and my former job. Dr. Jung completed his degree in Columbia and immediately joined the company and spent two years in the same building at the same time.
On March 11, an article titled’ABL, Preclinical Announcement of 4-1BB Platform at AACR’ also begins to appear. News from various bio companies such as Pamexin, Medifacto, Aptabio, Abclone, Kanaf, and Genome & Company appear one after another. The reason is that AACR opened the abstract on March 10th. Therefore, Park Creator listed all the poster titles for domestic companies. As soon as those massive AACR abstracts were opened, they said they spent two days reading the abstracts. So, it seems that I was able to grasp the flow included in the abstracts. He added, “In particular, the keywords most often seen in immuno-anti-cancer IO research are’Conditionally activated’,’Bispecific, Trispecific’. Therefore, in the field of immuno-anti-cancer, double (triple) antibodies dominate the trend,” he said in another post. I wrote it down.
Why has AACR been a long-standing conference for 112 years? AACR is a place where cancer researchers communicate with their current science. This is because it is an introduction to each other’s cancer research. Communicate with other cancer researchers through annual conferences and journals published by conferences such as Cancer Research. For researchers, science is a daily routine. There is a need for a place of communication to share a piece of daily life with other researchers. Because research is lonely. This is because I want to go out to a new world of science through that communication.
How will scientists also communicate their professional content with non-professionals? You have to worry about that too. It is not easy to talk about research with people who are not’industry’. How about practicing communicating my research to others? In the startup industry, it is said that it is essential to prepare an “elevator speech” that appeals to potential investors who come across an elevator to the promising potential of their business. Potential investors are, of course, people who don’t know what kind of startup I’m working on, but I need to be able to convey the core while making it easy to understand my business in 30 seconds.
After all, the purpose of startups is to make science business. How to commercialize science? In order to connect the two, there must be a’bridge’. ‘Science to Business’, S2B can’t convert even the best Nobel Prize science into cash. If there is a sea between science and business that cannot be swam across, sharks are infested, and if a river exists, crocodiles rule the river. A bridge is required to cross the sea or river and contribute to the’health of humanity’. It becomes possible to develop new drugs that save people.
Therefore, startups need to communicate with potential investors. It requires intense strategy and a lot of practice. If researchers also practice this, it is not only useful to actually use it, but also what is the core of my research, what content is difficult to explain, how it is easier to understand when explaining it, and what content can attract the attention of the other person. It will be possible to grasp whether there is a possibility, etc.
The AACR is clearly a debate about the basic science of cancer research. However, some Korean companies exaggerately overwrote the publication of a basic cancer research abstract as a tremendous achievement, exposing their desire for a rise in stock prices. Is this the right thing to do? It is important to provide the right information for investors. How can you act to overcome this situation?
I feel that there is a need for a place where companies that have submitted abstracts to AACR come together to reveal what research is underway. Even if the anticancer field is a little different, I think that it is a way to gather common points and divide them into several groups to share. The data I (or the company) submitted to the abstract is only data, so it is neither left nor right, nor is it neutral. Depending on how this data is interpreted by other researchers or investors, it may be thrown into trash or turned into gems.
In the spring of 2021, Corona is still struggling, but let’s create an atmosphere where you can have fun and freely’discuss’ about the research topics you (or the company) are conducting anytime, anywhere. As AACR started 111 years ago, I think that’open mind (open mind)’ is really necessary for Korean startups to grow. From the point of view of a researcher, creator Park of Gasingil TV is a non-major and general public. But when you look at the programs he runs, he is an expert. I think this kind of field is necessary for the general public, who are non-majors, to properly invest in the valuable new drug development market. This is because they are win-win games with each other.
※The column is the columnist’s personal opinion and may not match the editorial direction of this magazine.