Docetaxel

Gilead Sciences and Merck & Co. began the week with a mixed clinical scorecard.In back-to-back announcements Monday, the partners revealed they are discontinuing a Phase III study testing Gilead's TROP2-directed antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) Trodelvy (sacituzumab govitecan-hziy) in combination with Merck's Keytruda (pembrolizumab) in lung cancer, while at the same time touting the success of their experimental once-weekly HIV pill in two other late-stage trials.The oncology setback throws a wrench into Gilead's expansion plans for Trodelvy, which is currently approved for two forms of breast cancer and for urothelial cancer. Lung cancer is a key target, but success so far has been uneven; the Phase III EVOKE-01 trial testing the TROP2 ADC as monotherapy against docetaxel in second-line non–small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) failed in 2024.'Numerical improvement'Meanwhile, the earlier mid-stage EVOKE-02 trial suggested that combining the drug with Keytruda could be promising in newly diagnosed patients, but that momentum doesn't appear to have carried into Phase III. As a result, the companies have decided to halt the EVOKE-03 trial (also known as KEYNOTE-D46).The study, which was testing the combo against Keytruda monotherapy, enrolled previously untreated metastatic NSCLC patients whose tumours expressed high levels of PD-L1. The decision followed a review by an external data monitoring committee, which found that although the Trodelvy-Keytruda combination produced a "numerical improvement" in progression-free survival, it failed to achieve statistical significance. The committee also concluded that the probability of achieving a significant overall survival benefit at the final analysis was "unlikely." No new safety signals were identified.The companies said there are no changes to other ongoing Trodelvy or Merck studies. The Trodelvy-Keytruda pairing was tested in the triple-negative breast cancer ASCENT-04 and ASCENT-05 studies in the first-line metastatic and high-risk adjuvant settings, respectively.Non-inferiority to Biktarvy, ARTWhile the oncology programme stumbled, Gilead and Merck delivered more encouraging news involving their ongoing HIV partnership.The investigational once-weekly single-tablet regimen combining Gilead's capsid inhibitor lenacapavir with Merck's islatravir, a nucleoside reverse transcriptase translocation inhibitor, met the primary endpoint in both Phase III ISLEND-1 and ISLEND-2 studies of virologically suppressed patients at week 48.In ISLEND-1, the regimen was found to be statistically non-inferior to Gilead's Biktarvy (bictegravir/emtricitabine/tenofovir alafenamide), while ISLEND-2 showed non-inferiority against a range of standard-of-care daily oral antiretroviral therapy (ART) regimens. Safety findings were generally similar to the comparator treatments.The companies said they intend to file the data with regulators around the world for what could become the first once-weekly oral treatment option for people with HIV.Lenacapavir is already on the market as Sunlenca for multi-drug-resistant HIV and Yeztugo as a twice-yearly preventive shot. In April, the FDA approved a once-daily single-tablet regimen combining islatravir with doravirine under the name Idvynso for adults with virologically suppressed HIV-1.

PDAOAI Platform Indexes 28 Million PubMed Abstracts on Qdrant; Introduces Manifold Folding to Solve the Infinity Problem in Biomedical Knowledge Retrieval AGOURA HILLS, CA, June 08, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Oncotelic Therapeutics, Inc. (OTC: OTLC, “Oncotelic” or the “Company”), a clinical-stage immuno-oncology company developing first-in-class RNA therapeutics and small molecule drugs against cancer and infectious diseases, today announced that its proprietary PDAOAI ™ drug discovery and development platform will be featured inside the Product & Engineering keynote at Qdrant Vector Space Day 2026, taking place on Thursday, June 11, 2026 at The Midway in San Francisco. The 20-minute joint segment, “Building the DNA of Search,” will be delivered by Bastian Hofmann, Head of Product at Qdrant, together with Saran Saund, Chief Business Officer of Oncotelic, and Scott Myers, Product Manager at Oncotelic. The segment will detail how Oncotelic has successfully compressed the discovery of drug development for two product candidates, historically ranging from four to seven years and hundreds of millions of dollars per program in the pharmaceutical industry, to less than 2 years at a fraction of the cost, using PDAOAI running on Qdrant infrastructure. Oncotelic has already demonstrated this acceleration. Within a single 24-month execution window, the Company advanced two drug candidates, SAPU 003 and SAPU 006, through Sapu Nano (US) LLC, its 45% owned subsidiary through GMP Biotechnology, Limited (GMP Bio), from concept to Investigational New Drug (IND) filing, completing formulations, toxicology, and preclinical studies; building a clinical manufacturing facility from greenfield to GMP certification; and shipping clinical trial materials for first-in-human use. Highlights of the announcement include: Manifold Folding: A Breakthrough in Semantic Retrieval. Oncotelic’s novel “manifold folding” technique helps reshape the high-dimensional embedding space to cluster related concepts tightly while separating unrelated ones, delivering smaller search regions, higher retrieval precision, and substantially reduced LLM hallucination. 28 Million PubMed Abstracts on Qdrant. PDAOAI indexes the totality of published human biomedical knowledge — the full publicly available PubMed corpus, approximately 28 million biomedical abstracts — live on Qdrant Cloud, using hybrid search, payload filtering, HNSW indexing, and quantization for production-scale retrieval. Shell Sampling Built on Qdrant Primitives. Oncotelic’s “shell sampling” pattern, built on Qdrant’s prefetch and cosine primitives, retrieves a bounded ring of semantically related abstracts, rather than just the closest matches returned by standard vector search. VP - Technology Mike Potts will detail the technique in a forthcoming Qdrant developer-community webinar. “This partnership with Qdrant is what makes serious vector search affordable for a focused biotech,” said Saran Saund. “Qdrant's primitives, hybrid search, payload filtering, HNSW indexing, quantization, give us the production layer to run 28 million vectors at a cost structure that lets us advance more programs. We look forward to walking through the architecture at Vector Space Day with Bastian Hofmann, and to Mike Potts presenting the deeper technique in the dedicated developer-community webinar to follow.” “Oncotelic's deployment of PDAOAI on Qdrant is exactly what we built our vector search engine for, production-scale hybrid search across tens of millions of vectors, with payload filtering and quantization that make domain-specific applications economically viable,” said André Zayarni, Chief Executive Officer of Qdrant. “What Oncotelic has built on top of our primitives, manifold folding for biomedical literature, is one of the most ambitious applications of vector search in healthcare we have seen. We are delighted to feature their work in the Product & Engineering keynote at Vector Space Day.” Vector Space Day 2026 is Qdrant’s flagship developer event, bringing together engineering and product leaders working on production-scale vector search across artificial intelligence applications. About Oncotelic Therapeutics, Inc. Oncotelic Therapeutics, Inc. is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on the development of oncology and immunotherapy products. The Company’s mission is to address high-unmet-need cancers and rare pediatric indications with innovative, late-stage therapeutic candidates. In addition to its directly owned and developed drug pipeline, Oncotelic benefits from a robust portfolio of inventions created by its CEO, Dr. Vuong Trieu, who has filed over 500 patent applications and holds 75 issued patents. The Company also leverages its proprietary AI-enabled PDAOAI platform, which supports research, biomarker discovery, and regulatory processes through advanced data analysis and knowledge integration. Beyond its internal programs, Oncotelic licenses and co-develops select drug candidates through strategic partnerships and joint ventures. The Company currently owns a 45% interest in GMP Bio, a joint venture advancing a complementary pipeline of therapeutic candidates that further strengthens Oncotelic’s position in oncology and rare disease therapeutics. For more information, please visit: About Qdrant Qdrant is an open-source vector database and vector search engine designed to power next-generation artificial intelligence applications, including semantic search, recommendation systems, and retrieval-augmented generation. Qdrant Cloud is the company’s managed offering used by enterprises to deploy vector search at production scale. For further information, please visit . Forward-Looking Statements This press release contains “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements regarding Oncotelic’s expectations and beliefs concerning its proprietary PDAOAI platform; the anticipated capabilities, performance, scalability, and benefits of the platform, including but not limited to manifold folding, shell sampling, and integration with Qdrant infrastructure; the expected impact of the platform on the timeline, cost, and probability of success of Oncotelic’s drug discovery and development programs; the continued completion of drug discovery in 24 months for future products; the Company’s expectations regarding planned and forthcoming public disclosures, presentations, and webinars; the Company’s or GMP Bio’s intellectual property strategy and the scope, validity, or enforceability of any patent applications referenced herein; the Company’s or GMP Bio’s clinical pipeline, including OT-101 and other product candidates; potential regulatory designations, including rare pediatric disease designation; and the Company’s ability to develop, advance, partner, or commercialize its own product candidates. These statements involve substantial known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause actual results, performance, or achievements to differ materially from any future results, performance, or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such factors include, but are not limited to: the inherent uncertainty of pharmaceutical research and development, including the risk that AI-enabled approaches may not deliver the timeline or cost compression anticipated for its or GMP Bio’s future product candidates; the Company’s ability to obtain additional financing necessary to fund its operations; the timing and outcome of clinical trials and regulatory submissions and decisions; the ability to protect intellectual property and the outcome of patent prosecution; competition from other companies, including those developing competing therapeutics or competing AI-enabled drug discovery platforms; reliance on third parties, including contract research organizations, contract manufacturers, cloud infrastructure providers, and partners such as Qdrant; the risk that platform performance, latency, accuracy, or hallucination rates may differ in production from the figures discussed herein; the risk that anticipated public disclosures, conference presentations, partnership opportunities, or webinar engagements may not occur on the timeline expected or at all; general economic, political, and market conditions; and the additional risks and uncertainties described in the Company’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including without limitation the Company’s most recent 2025 Annual Report on Form 10-K, any subsequent Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and any Current Reports on Form 8-K. The forward-looking statements made in this release speak only as of the date of this release and may not be indicative of the results for any of the forward looking statements in the future. The Company expressly disclaims any obligation or undertaking to update any forward-looking statements contained herein to reflect any change in its expectations with regard thereto or any change in events, conditions, or circumstances on which any such statement is based, except as may be required by law. Investor and Media Contact Oncotelic Therapeutics, Inc. 29397 Agoura Road, Suite 107 Agoura Hills, CA 91301 (650) 635-7000 ir@oncotelic.com Corporate Communications IBN Austin, Texas 512.354.7000 Office Editor@InvestorBrandNetwork.com ###