By Kate Goodwin Pictured: 3D rendering of antibody-drug conjugate/iStock, Love Employee BioNTech’s licensed antibody-drug conjugate is moving on to Phase III testing in a potential effort to challenge AstraZeneca and Daiichi Sankyo’s blockbuster Enherto in a heavily treated breast cancer subpopulation. DualityBio, BioNTech’s partner and the ADC’s creator, posted the trial plans Wednesday. BioNTech added the ADC, DB-1303, to its portfolio in April 2023 when it paid China’s DualityBio $170 million upfront for rights to it plus a second preclinical asset. Another $1.5 billion is on the line in milestone payments, plus tiered royalties. DB-1303 will be pitted against chemotherapy in the open-label Phase III for patients with HER2-low, HR+ metastatic breast cancer patients whose disease has progressed despite endocrine therapy. ADC therapy is like a targeted missile for cancer, with an antibody targeted to deliver the cancer killing payload. DB-1303 is a topoisomerase-1 inhibitor. Phase I/II trial results showed ...
The University of Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences has successfully developed a new model to predict the likelihood of a person developing and dying of breast cancer within ten years. The new risk-based screening model works to identify those at the highest risk of deadly cancers. Despite the ability of breast cancer screening to reduce deaths, it can sometimes lead to unnecessary treatments due to overdiagnosis when innocuous tumours are detected. In the UK, for every 10,000 women aged 50 years invited to breast screening for the next 20 years, 43 breast cancer deaths will be prevented, but 129 will be overdiagnosed. Researchers analysed anonymised data from 11.9 million women aged 20 to 90 years between 2000 and 2020 from the OResearch database. The team tested four different modelling techniques to predict breast cancer mortality risk: two traditional statistical-based models and two artificial intelligence (AI) models, all ...
Merck & Co – known as MSD outside the US and Canada – has announced that its anti-PD-1 therapy Keytruda (pembrolizumab) has been approved by the European Commission (EC) as part of a combination treatment for certain gastric cancer patients. The therapy is now approved in combination with trastuzumab, fluoropyrimidine- and platinum-containing chemotherapy for the first-line treatment of locally advanced unresectable or metastatic HER2-positive gastric or gastroesophageal junction (GEJ) adenocarcinoma. Patients eligible for the Keytruda regimen will also have tumours that express PD-L1 with a combined positive score of one or more, the company outlined. Gastric cancer is the fifth most commonly diagnosed cancer and the fourth leading cause of cancer death worldwide, with nearly 1.1 million new cases diagnosed and more than 768,000 deaths from the disease globally in 2020. Most gastric cancers are adenocarcinomas, which develop from cells in the innermost lining of the stomach. As the disease ...
By Tristan Manalac Pictured: Magnifying glass focusing on a tumor in an ovary/iStock, Mohammed Haneefa Nizamudeen In the Phase III INNOVATE-3 trial, Novocure’s investigational ovarian cancer therapy Tumor Treating Fields was unable to significantly improve overall survival, the company announced Monday. Patients who received Tumor Treating Fields (TTFields) treatment combined with paclitaxel had a median overall survival (OS) of 12.2 months, which was only marginally higher than the 11.9-month median OS in comparators treated with paclitaxel alone. In terms of safety, TTFields remained well-tolerated and showed no new signals of concerns or systemic toxicities. Its adverse event profile in INNOVATE-3 was consistent with what had previously been reported. TTFields is an investigational oncology therapy that uses electric fields that act via many different mechanisms to kill cancer cells. Because it works via several pathways, the approach can be combined with other treatment modalities—such as PARP inhibitors and immune checkpoint inhibitors—to ...
Researchers at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center published two studies this week on a new approach that could improve treatment for patients with pancreatic cancer — a disease that an estimated 64,050 U.S. adults will be diagnosed with in 2023. The preclinical studies showed that combining immunotherapy with a KRAS inhibitor can lead to long-lasting tumor elimination in pancreatic cancer. The research explored the functional role of KRAS mutations in pancreatic cancer. KRAS belongs to a family of genes that encode proteins that participate in cell signaling, activating or deactivating to regulate the growth of cells. When KRAS are mutated, they cause the uncontrolled cell growth that occurs in cancer. The oncology community has known “for a while now” that KRAS mutations drive pancreatic cancer, but it has had a hard time figuring out a way to effectively drug these mutated genes, explained Dr. Raghu Kalluri, an ...
By Connor Lynch Pictured: Merck logo on building/iStock, Sundry Photography Merck and Eisai have dropped another joint drug trial after disappointing Phase III results. The companies announced Friday that they would be ending their combination treatment of Keytruda and Lenvima, respectively, after a second interim analysis found no improvement in overall survival. The LEAP-010 trial was evaluating the safety and effectiveness of Merck’s anti-PD-1 therapy in combination with Eisai’s multiple receptor tyrosine kinase inhibitor for metastatic or unresectable head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC). An independent monitoring committee conducted two interim analyses over the course of 11 months. Initial results from the first analysis were promising: the therapy combo met two of the trial’s three primary endpoints of progression-free survival and objective response (OS) rate. However, the treatment failed to show evidence of meeting the third endpoint, overall survival, in the second analysis. The companies in Friday’s announcement said ...
Enterome is planning to raise EUR100m ($108m) as part of its latest fundraising round to power its clinical studies, said CEO Pierre Belichard in an interview with Pharmaceutical Technology. The company has already started speaking to investors in Europe and plans to start contacting those in the US in early September, he said. The funding will go towards the company’s clinical trials, which include two new Phase II studies, said Belichard. Enterome’s E02463 is an off-the-shelf immunotherapy that is made of four bacterial peptides of B lymphocyte-specific lineage markers. These peptides are based on the company’s OncoMimics approach, which uses specific peptide combinations derived from bacteria in the gut microbiome. The company had previously raised EUR 46.3m as part of its Series E round, based on a June 2020 release, while Belichard added that Enterome has raised EUR 116m to date. While Enterome is not actively looking to go public ...
A new editorial paper was published in Oncoscience (Volume 10) on August 17, 2023, entitled, “Cancer drug development yesterday, today and tomorrow.” In this new editorial, researchers Elzbieta Izbicka and Robert T. Streeper from New Frontier Labs discuss the history of cancer drug development and how it has evolved over time. The editorial also highlights the current state of cancer drug development and what the future may hold. Editorial Introduction: The “war on cancer” began with the National Cancer Act, a United States federal law intended “to amend the Public Health Service Act so as to strengthen the National Cancer Institute in order to more effectively carry out the national effort against cancer” that was signed by President Richard Nixon on December 23, 1971. As the 50th anniversary is now two years gone, the war has not been necessarily a blitzkrieg. To paraphrase Charles Dickens, today “it is the best ...
Pfizer is shelling out $43 billion to acquire Seagen primarily for the Seattle biotech’s antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) capabilities. But a trial win for a small-molecule cancer drug makes the deal more attractive. Seagen on Wednesday said a phase 3 trial testing a combination of its Tukysa and Roche’s Kadcyla has hit its main goal in patients with previously treated HER2-positive breast cancer. Compared with Kadcyla and placebo, the combo significantly reduced the risk of tumor progression or death, Seagen said. Data on patient survival remain immature. Seagen plans to share the detailed results from the HER2CLIMB-02 trial at a medical meeting and will discuss them with the FDA, the company’s R&D chief, Roger Dansey, said in a statement. The positive results further de-risk the Seagen acquisition by Pfizer, Leerink Partners analysts said in a Wednesday note. Since securing FDA approval in 2020, Tukysa has been used alongside trastuzumab (Herceptin) and ...
By Tristan Manalac Pictured: Cancer cells growing on the liver/iStock, Rasi Bhadramani The FDA on Monday approved Delcath Systems’ Hepzato Kit for the liver-directed treatment of adult patients with metastatic uveal melanoma, capping a nearly decade-long effort to secure regulatory approval. Hepzato’s label covers metastatic uveal melanoma (mUM) patients with unresectable hepatic metastases that afflicts less than 50% of their liver and who do not show signs of extra-hepatic disease. Hepzato can also be used in cases of extra-hepatic spread, provided it is limited to the bone, lymph nodes, subcutaneous tissues or lungs. Monday’s approval makes Hepzato “the only liver-directed therapy that can treat the whole liver,” Delcath Chief Medical Officer Vojislav Vukovic said in a statement. The approved product comes with a boxed warning for severe peri-procedural complications, such as hemorrhage and hepatocellular injury, as well as myelosuppression. To manage these risks, the company will implement a Risk Evaluation ...
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