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AstraZeneca has sought to reassure investors that its plans to replace traditional chemotherapy with a new generation of targeted drugs are on track, as it announced full trial results at a medical congress on Monday.
David Fredrickson, executive vice-president of oncology business at AstraZeneca, said it was a “massive achievement” in a “really ambitious programme” to be presenting two clinical trials — in lung cancer and breast cancer — that showed their new treatment was better than the chemotherapy that doctors have been dependent on for over a decade.
The Anglo-Swedish drugmaker has partnered with Daiichi Sankyo, the Japanese pharmaceutical company, on the development of two key “antibody drug conjugates”, which use antibodies to deliver a chemotherapy payload to a tumour with fewer side effects.
The first drug, Enhertu, is already transforming the treatment of breast cancer, giving investors high hopes for successful trials of the second, known as Dato-DXd.
But investors were disappointed in July when AstraZeneca did not declare the initial results from a trial in lung cancer “clinically meaningful”, sending the stock down 5 per cent. When the summaries of the papers presented at a European cancer conference were released last week, the stock lost a further 5 per cent in a day.
Susan Galbraith, executive vice-president of oncology research and development, said the company considered the full data from the trial “clinically meaningful”, especially in a segment that makes up about 70 per cent of the patients, those with “non-squamous” lung cancer.
“There’s really clinically meaningful benefit, with better tolerability than standard chemotherapy in that patient population. And I think that’s important,” she said.
The lung cancer trial, which studied more than 600 patients, compared the new drug candidate Dato-DXd with docetaxel, a chemo drug first approved in the 1990s but still in use today. It found that the new treatment helped patients live for a median of 4.4 months without their tumour growing, compared with 3.7 months on docetaxel. For the non-squamous subset, the median was 5.6 months, compared with 3.7.
Analysts at Jefferies, commenting on the initial release of the summary lung cancer data last week, said the overall results may disappoint, but the result in the subset was “strong”.
The breast cancer trial also showed a “statistically significant and clinically meaningful” improvement in the amount of times patients survived without their tumours growing, according to the scientific paper.
In 2020, AstraZeneca partnered with Daiichi Sankyo on Dato-DXd in a deal worth up to $6bn, following its agreement on Enhertu, also worth up to $6.9bn, the year before. The companies have invested heavily in trials for both drugs in different types of cancers and combinations with other treatments.
But last week, Daiichi Sankyo announced it had partnered with US Merck on three new potential antibody drug conjugates in a deal worth up to $22bn, if the drugs are approved and hit several sales milestones. Shares in Daiichi soared 14 per cent on Friday after the deal was announced, while Merck, known as MSD outside the US, gained 1.6 per cent.
Galbraith did not comment on whether AstraZeneca had bid to partner on the next drugs in the pipeline. But she said it has its own homegrown pipeline of four antibody drug conjugates in clinical trials, and has done two deals with Chinese companies to partner on their ADCs.
“We are committed to the fact that ADCs have very exciting potential to replace backbone chemotherapy across a range of different tumour types,” she said.
This article has been amended since publication to correct the median figure for how many months patients in the non-squamous subset of AstraZeneca’s lung cancer trial lived without their tumour growing.
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