BeyondSpring presents poster on plinabulin’s anti-cancer efficacy

BeyondSpring announced that the Company and Professor Kathryn M. Eisenmann of the University of Toledo College of Medicine presented a poster on the potent efficacy of plinabulin in a derived patient model of glioblastoma, a disease of high unmet need at the 2023 AACR Special Conference in Cancer Research: Brain Cancer on Oct 20th, 2023 at Minneapolis, MN. Professor Eisenmann’s research interests include glioblastoma invasion programs and developing small molecule therapeutics that target cytoskeleton networks. She has built a comprehensive glioblastoma patient cell line repository of more than 6 dozen samples of primary and therapy-resistant recurrent tumors. The presentation demonstrated the monotherapy activity of plinabulin at 10-30 nM at killing 3D neurospheres from five glioblastoma multiforme patient-derived primary cell lines and therapy-resistant cell lines. Plinabulin was confirmed to have anti-proliferative properties in GBM at therapeutic concentrations. Plinabulin blocked GBM patient-derived sphere invasion, while significantly decreasing GBM cell survival and extension of microtubules. This model is directly relevant to the recurrence of glioblastoma after resection, and plinabulin killed these cells and stopped the spread of the tumor. “Recent investigation into targeted therapies has failed to address invasion and cytoskeleton based GBM therapy resistance. Plinabulin, which can pass blood brain barrier, is a differentiated microtubule-targeting and immune-oncology agent. Plinabulin had shown single agent activity in transgenic GBM animal model with survival benefit compared to placebo,” said Dr. Kathryn Eisenmann. “This presentation further demonstrates plinabulin’s potential in brain tumor, which is severely unmet medical needs.”