Five Promising Cancer Drug Results
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A quick run-down of studies presented this morning at a press conference at the annual meeting of the American Society for Clinical Oncology, the biggest gathering of U.S. cancer doctors.
- Pazopanib, a GlaxoSmithKline pill approved for kidney cancer, showed positive results in a study of 940 women who had disease that had not gotten worse after five or more rounds of chemotherapy. The median time to disease worsening was 17.9 months in the pazopanib group versus 12.3 months for placebo. Carol Aghajanian, an gynecologic oncologist commenting for ASCO, said that the results were positive and indicated that drugs that work by starving tumors of blood, as pazopanib does, could play a key role in treating ovarian cancer. Roche’s Avastin, which works similarly, has also shown positive results in ovarian cancer.
- Are two drugs that stimulate the immune system to attack cancer better than one? Wall Street is focused on this question with regard to Bristol-Myers Squibb’s Yervoy and its experimental drug targeting PD-1. But a study showed adding Leukine, or GM-CSF, to Yervoy boosted its effectiveness, allowing patients to live a median 17.5 months compared to 12.7 months for those who got Yervoy alone. There also seemed to be fewer side effects. Both drugs are available now, said Lynn Schuchter, an ASCO spokeswoman and melanoma expert, but its not clear whether this small (245 patients) study will be enough to moving the combo to everyday use. Regardless, it bodes well for the strategy of combining immunotherapies.
- Results of Bristol’s anti-PD-1 drug, nivolumab, were also presented, showing a median survival of 16.8 months in a single-arm study. That’s as good or better as any previous melanoma drug. Thirty-one percent of patients saw tumors shrink (41% of those at the dose that will be used in further trials) and the response can keep working even after the drug was stopped. Seventeen of 33 patients stopped treatment, and 12 of them continued responding to the drug for four months or more. This continues to support the benefit of this experimental medicine. Merck and Roche are developing competitors.
- Selumetinib, from Array Biopharma and AstraZeneca, also showed positive results. Results from a late-stage study showed that in uveal melanoma (that’s melanoma of the eye) patients were likely to see their tumors shrink on this new drug, but not on the older melanoma treatment temozolomide. It took 15.9 weeks for their disease to worse, versus 7 for the older drug.
- “I think the study in uveal melanoma will ultimately be practice changing,” said Schucter. “This has been a very difficult disease to treat.”
- Another study, funded by the German Merck KgaA (not to be confused with the U.S. drugmaker) compared Eli Lilly’s Erbitux and Roche’s Avastin as treatments for metastatic colorectal cancer that does not have a mutation in the gene KRAS. (That mutation is used to select drugs for treatment.) This was on top of a slightly different chemotherapy regimen than the one used in the U.S Erbitux made tumors shrink more; there was no difference in how long it took the cancer to worsen or tumors to grow. But the patients who received Erbitux lived 23% longer. The study’s author, Volker Heinemann of the University of Munich, suggested that this might mean that patients and doctors should be more likely to use Avastin. Richard M. Goldberg, an gastrointestinal cancer expert and ASCO spokesman, disagreed somewhat. “Patients have options. There’s no clear winner from my perspective from this,” he said.
