Luke Piggott, principal scientist at Debiopharm, has a unique business model in the drug discovery and development to commercialization landscape. Focusing on rare cancers, they license drugs from smaller biotechs and conduct clinical trials before out-licensing them to larger pharmaceutical companies with marketing capabilities. The use of AI is expanding biomarker discovery and the identification of potential novel mechanisms for targeted therapies. Novel-novel combinations are being explored to provide therapies with more selective profiles with fewer side effects.

Luke explains, "Rare cancers is an interesting area. I mean, it's never an easy one to be developing in the space of rare cancers. With a business model like ours, we have the opportunity to take some of these assets that perhaps are not as, shall we say, financially attractive to investors because of the smaller market opportunity. As a privately owned company, we have the ability to develop these kinds of drugs and move them ahead with solid financial backing. And so I think that's one of the areas that we have the opportunity where some other companies would not."

"We do see overlap there with other diseases, although they may be morphologically different than the current specific sites that are more rare than other diseases. These underlying mechanisms are consistent across the different types of cancers. Now that we're in the era of precision medicine and going after specific key oncogenic drivers of these tumors, it does allow potential opportunities to treat them in a more similar fashion, shall we say, to the larger populations or at least re-purpose some of those drugs and try them out on these rarer diseases."

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