Geron Corporation

This an ugly chart of Geron Corporation. Geron (GERN)is a biotech company that has products in current clinical trials that target various types of cancer. What is interesting about one of the drugs that they are working on is they are binding chemotherapy agents to proteins to allow them to cross the blood-brain-barrier(GRN1005). Having recently helped a family member battle cancer, one of the worst scenarios is when a cancer tumor metastasizes to the brain. Currently the treatment for this is radiation. This treatment is brutal, and usually coincides with chemotherapy for treatment for the primary tumor site. This one-two punch is usually a really heavy burden on the patient, and really sucks what ever energy they have. Brain radiation is especially tough, the fatigue and disorientation can make life significantly challenging even when the treatment is working. The idea of having a drug that could cross the blood-brain-barrier could be a significant breakthrough,as treatment could coincide with regular chemotherapy without needing the daily brain radiation treatments.

The active chemotherapy agent in GRN1005 is Paclitaxel. This is an already known agent that is used, so the known side effects are known to oncology field. Using this drug would not be like a total unknown, as it is widely used without the peptide that would allow it to cross the blood-brain-barrier. A drug my family member was on that really had positive results was Abraxane. This was Paclitaxel bound to the human protein Albumin. This Abraxan drug was developed by Abraxis Bioscience which was taken over by Celgene.

Does all of this mean Geron is going to be higher next week? No it doesn't. Its products are currently in phase 2 trials, so it will be more than a couple years before these drugs are on the market. Recently the company was in the news for leaving the stemcell/spinal injury trials it was doing. This was not as big a market as the oncology field. They decided to focus their resources on its oncology product development. Times are tough and focusing on a more defined profitable market was needed to keep the company going in a healthy manner.

This is a link to a description of their other oncology products in development.




List of Drugs in Development(GRNOPC1 discontinued)

.
.	Product	Product Description	Disease Treatment	Development Stage	Patient Enrollment Status
.	Imetelstat	Telomerase Inhibitor	Non-Small Cell Lung	Phase 2 Trial	Open
.	(GRN163L)		Cancer (NSCLC)
.			Breast Cancer	Phase 2 Trial	Open
.			Multiple Myeloma	Phase 2 Trial	Open
.			Essential	Phase 2 Trial	Open
.			Thrombocythemia
.	GRN1005	Peptide-Conjugated	Brain Metastases from	Phase 2 Trial	Planned to open in
.		Paclitaxel	Breast Cancer		fourth quarter 2011
.			Brain Metastases from	Phase 2 Trial	Planned to open in
.			NSCLC		fourth quarter 2011
.	GRNOPC1	Oligodendrocyte	Spinal Cord Injury	Phase 1 Trial	Open
.		Progenitor Cells