The Seattle-based company came to ASCO25 with new data on its neuroendocrine tumor–treating lead therapy, with big vibes and speedy speech.
It’s hard to tell if Thijs Spoor and Michael Schultz are talking fast because they are excited about their data or because they just have so much to say. The CEO and CSO/founder of Perspective Therapeutics show me multiple slides of their drug accumulating in a mouse’s tumors.
“In the radiopharma business, it all comes down to area under the curve,” Spoor said over the din of the ASCO25 conference floor. He’s referring to the amount of drug that ends up actually attacking a tumor versus hitting off-target tissues. “We designed this molecule to target the tumor and stay there over the time. Other molecules go all over the body, they go from tissue to tissue.”
Radiotherapies are growing rapidly in popularity. The cancer drugs deliver radioactive payloads in a more targeted way than the classic radiation therapies patients have been undergoing for decades.
One of the molecules Perspective came to Chicago to present is [212Pb]VMT-α-NET, a peptide-guided lead-based therapy for treating neuroendocrine tumors (NETs). The treatment works something like an antibody-drug conjugate (ADC), where a protein targets a tumor cell and delivers a therapeutic agent tethered to it, in this case a dose of radioactive lead that shoots out alpha particles. Perspective is testing the drug in a Phase I/IIa trial in a small cohort of patients.
“The standard of care objective response rate for NETs is about 13%,” Schultz said. “Ours is 50%.” That’s three confirmed objective responses and a fourth that needs confirmation, out of seven patients, according to the data Perspective presented at the conference.
While none of the patients in the trial so far have achieved complete responses, for NETs, “just stabilizing” is an achievement from a doctor’s point of view, according to Spoor.
The radiopharma business is booming as multiple big players are getting involved in the space. Novartis is leading the way with north of $2 billion combined sales from Lutathera, its lutetium-coupled drug for gastroenteropancreatic NETs, and Pluvicto, its lutetium drug for metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer. AstraZeneca, Eli Lilly, Bristol Myers Squibb and others are also developing radiotherapy treatments of their own.
Spoor makes sure to differentiate Perspective’s choice of element from that of Novartis. Novartis’ treatments give off beta particles while Perspective’s lead asset emits alpha particles, which are larger and therefore deliver more energy over a shorter distance. They provide a “bigger punch,” Spoor said.
Spoor and Schultz’s energy is palpable. The company is building manufacturing sites in Chicago, Los Angeles and Houston. It has a proprietary chelator for removing the lead treatment after dosing and a platform for generating its treatments. “We can infinitely scale up,” Spoor said.
“$200 million on the balance sheet takes us to the end of 2026 if everything goes as fast as possible,” Spoor said of the company’s runway and future plans. Even as he and Schultz describe how much better Perspective’s treatments are in comparison to the competition, they appreciate that the field is growing.
“It’s exciting for me to see a field I’ve been a part of for a long time to see a surge,” said Schultz, who started the company in 2004 after working on NETs at the University of Iowa’s Carver College of Medicine. “To be here [at ASCO] and see it being presented with such great results to such a huge community is a dream come true.”
