As­traZeneca caps its big win in lung can­cer with pos­i­tive sur­vival da­ta for Imfinzi — and what a re­lief it is

As­traZeneca capped its big win on the land­mark PA­CIF­IC study to­day with the news that its PD-L1 check­point Imfinzi de­liv­ered a sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant im­prove­ment in over­all sur­vival for a key seg­ment of the lung can­cer mar­ket. 

Pas­cal So­ri­ot

The OS score dur­ing an in­ter­im analy­sis is for pa­tients whose stage III non-small cell lung can­cer hasn’t pro­gressed af­ter chemora­di­a­tion and whose tu­mors can’t be sur­gi­cal­ly re­moved. The da­ta here — specifics will fol­low at a con­fer­ence — will help As­traZeneca con­sol­i­date a cru­cial lead spot for it­self, which As­traZeneca CEO Pas­cal So­ri­ot has boast­ed will put the phar­ma gi­ant in the lead for “half the pool in lung can­cer.”

The FDA has al­ready come through with an OK for As­traZeneca here, un­der­scor­ing that reg­u­la­tors aren’t wait­ing for every i to be dot­ted and every t crossed be­fore get­ting new can­cer drugs to pa­tients and doc­tors.

Dave Fredrick­son

The im­por­tance of the very re­al suc­cess here for So­ri­ot is hard to over­state. The CEO has to cap­i­tal­ize on ad­vances for the can­cer drug port­fo­lio to prove to in­vestors that new drugs can fi­nal­ly pro­vide the fi­nan­cial turn­around that As­traZeneca has to have as the Crestor fran­chise melts away. PA­CIF­IC is blaz­ing a path for a would-be block­buster that can let So­ri­ot prove that.

Just a few days ago Dave Fredrick­son, who heads up the on­col­o­gy busi­ness unit for As­traZeneca, told an­a­lysts that PA­CIF­IC had swift­ly opened up a valu­able mar­ket seg­ment demon­strat­ing some pow­er­ful po­ten­tial. He not­ed:

This has re­sult­ed in a true in­flec­tion point for Imfinzi with sales now at $62 mil­lion in the first quar­ter and re­al­ly the over­whelm­ing ma­jor­i­ty of these com­ing from the lung can­cer in­di­ca­tion. As you saw from a slide that Pas­cal showed in Feb­ru­ary when we launched, we had about 3,500 pa­tient in­fu­sions per month and you could see that we’ve now dou­bled in the most re­cent month to 7,000 pa­tient in­fu­sions per month, re­al­ly show­ing that the un­der­ly­ing pa­tient de­mand is the dri­ver of these sales. 

Sean Bo­hen

The suc­cess in this seg­ment gives As­traZeneca’s can­cer team added cred­i­bil­i­ty for un­der­stand­ing how to score a strate­gic ad­vance in an in­tense­ly com­pet­i­tive field, with Mer­ck and Bris­tol-My­ers tus­sling for dom­i­nance in front­line lung can­cer. Com­ing on the heels of the em­bar­rass­ing first-round MYS­TIC fail­ure, it al­so of­fered an en­cour­ag­ing en­dorse­ment for the com­pa­ny’s R&D com­pe­tence.

As­traZeneca CMO Sean Bo­hen said: “The read­out of pos­i­tive over­all sur­vival da­ta at the in­ter­im analy­sis of the PA­CIF­IC tri­al pro­vides ad­di­tion­al com­pelling ev­i­dence of the clin­i­cal ben­e­fit that Imfinzi can of­fer pa­tients in this ear­li­er stage of lung can­cer.”

Image courtesy of The Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson.

Pro­tect­ing the glob­al phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal in­no­va­tion ecosys­tem – what’s at stake?

We are living in a new era of healthcare that is rapidly advancing progress impacting patient outcomes and experiences. We’ve seen a remarkable pace of transformational innovation, applied research, and advanced clinical development over the last decade.

Despite this tremendous progress, there is much more work to be done, and patients are counting on us – now more than ever – to continue that momentum. At the heart of our industry is a focus on developing and delivering medicines for some of the world’s most challenging diseases, including those that have few or no effective treatments today.

Mi­rati’s drug sitra­va­tinib flops PhI­II in com­bo with Op­di­vo for cer­tain lung can­cer

Mirati Therapeutics’ path to a second drug approval will likely have to wait. The San Diego biotech company said Wednesday that its investigational lung cancer drug failed a Phase III trial testing it in combination with Bristol Myers Squibb’s Opdivo.

The drug, sitravatinib, and Opdivo weren’t better than the chemo drug docetaxel at keeping patients alive, Mirati said in a press release. The spectrum-selective kinase inhibitor missed the primary goal of overall survival in patients with second- or third-line advanced non-squamous, non-small cell lung cancer.

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End­points 20(+2) un­der 40, 2023; Bio­phar­ma's high­est-paid CEOs; N-of-1 CRISPR sto­ry goes on af­ter tragedy; and more

Welcome back to Endpoints Weekly, your review of the week’s top biopharma headlines. Want this in your inbox every Saturday morning? Current Endpoints readers can visit their reader profile to add Endpoints Weekly. New to Endpoints? Sign up here.

We will be off Monday in observance of Memorial Day — and when we get back, it will be a straight march to ASCO, BIO and more. Enjoy the (long) weekend!

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Rich Horgan (R) with his late brother, Terry

Rich Hor­gan spear­head­ed a gene ther­a­py for his broth­er. The tri­al end­ed in tragedy, but the work con­tin­ues for more pa­tients

Rich Horgan’s quest to create a custom gene therapy for his brother, Terry, ended in tragedy. But Horgan doesn’t believe it’s the end of the story.

Terry, a 27-year-old patient with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, died last October just eight days after receiving the therapy in a clinical trial in which he was the only participant. The case raised questions about the safety of certain gene therapies and what would happen to other drug programs under a nonprofit that Horgan created, called Cure Rare Disease.

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Bio­phar­ma's 20 high­est-paid CEOs of 2022, each bring­ing in $20M+ pay­days

Even in a down year for much of the biopharma market, 20 CEOs brought in pay packages valued at more than $20 million, an Endpoints News analysis found.

Endpoints collected data on more than 350 CEO compensation packages, covering a wide range of pharma, biotech, and life sciences companies. All told, the 20 largest earners made over $725 million in 2022 — an average package of $36.4 million. Three brought in paydays over $50 million, and one CEO broke the $100 million mark.

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The 20(+2) un­der 40: Your guide to the next gen­er­a­tion of biotech lead­ers

This year’s list of 20 biotech leaders under the age of 40 includes a huge range of ambitions. Some of our honorees are planning to create the next big drug giant. Others are pushing the bounds of AI. One is working to revolutionize TB testing. All are compelling talents who are still young in age, but already far along in achievement.

And, as in years past, we went over. The 20 are actually 22 because of two double profiles that reflect how important teamwork is in the industry. As one of our honorees, Joe Illingworth of DJS Antibodies, told me in our interview, “It takes a village to raise a biotech.”

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Teresa Bitetti, Takeda's president of the global oncology business unit

Take­da wins pri­or­i­ty re­view for $400M col­orec­tal can­cer drug, li­censed from Hutchmed in Jan­u­ary

Takeda and Hutchmed scored a priority review Thursday afternoon for a colorectal cancer drug, the companies announced.

The experimental drug in question is fruquintinib, previously approved in China in 2018 to treat metastatic colorectal cancer. Takeda and Hutchmed are aiming to bring fruquintinib to the US and other countries outside China in the same indication, and the FDA set its decision date for Nov. 30 of this year.

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David Ricks, Eli Lilly CEO (Carolyn Kaster/AP Images)

Lil­ly gears up trio of PhI­II tri­als for its oral GLP-1 amid No­vo Nordisk, Pfiz­er com­pe­ti­tion

As Novo Nordisk and Pfizer disclose some data on their oral weight loss drugs in Phase III and II, respectively, Eli Lilly is beefing up its stance in the obesity field with three late-stage clinical trials of its next-generation GLP-1 agonist orforglipron.

The moves, disclosed in updates to the federal clinical trials database this week, put the Indianapolis drugmaker ahead of Pfizer, whose science chief has said the company will “cherry-pick” which of its mid-stage candidates to take deeper into the clinic after data late this year or early next.

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Douglas Love, Annexon CEO

An­nex­on’s GA drug miss­es on pri­ma­ry goal but win on vi­su­al acu­ity will be fo­cus of planned late-stage tri­al

Annexon’s complement inhibitor didn’t prove better than sham at reducing lesion growth in a leading cause of blindness, but the biotech still plans to move forward on the back of secondary endpoints showing visual acuity preservation, which will “certainly” be the primary goal in a late-stage trial to be discussed shortly with the FDA, CEO Douglas Love told Endpoints News. 

The California biotech’s ANX007 was not statistically significant compared to pooled sham, the comparator, at 12 months in patients with geographic atrophy, per a Wednesday presentation. In every-month dosing, the GA lesion area changed about 6.2% from baseline (p=0.526) and 1.3% (p=0.896) in the every-other-month group. In a March note, Jefferies analyst Suji Jeong said a reduction of 20% to 30% would be “encouraging.”

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