Context 

Chordoma is a rare cancer of the spine and skull base, diagnosed roughly one person per million each year. There is no approved drug therapy for it anywhere in the world. The standard treatments are surgery and radiation, but more than half of patients eventually experience a recurrence, and many reach a point where surgery and radiation are no longer safe, effective, or possible. For those patients, drug therapy is the only remaining option, yet today only three drugs have been shown to provide meaningful benefit, and each benefit only some patients. The toolbox is far too small.  

The reason it remains small is structural. Because chordoma is rare, the commercial market is too limited to attract the sustained investment that ordinarily drives drug development, and no single hospital sees enough patients to study new therapies efficiently. As a result, promising treatment ideas have historically gone untested.