Eli Lil­ly hus­tles up an im­pres­sive set of piv­otal da­ta for their $8B Loxo drug — as ri­val nips at their heels

Eli Lil­ly’s $8 bil­lion bet on Loxo has paid off to­day with a con­vinc­ing set of lung can­cer da­ta for selper­ca­tinib (LOXO-292) that will keep the typ­i­cal­ly slug­gish phar­ma gi­ant at least one step ahead of ri­val Blue­print Med­i­cines as they both look to make a bee­line to the FDA. 

Re­searchers for the com­pa­ny turned out at the 2019 World Con­fer­ence on Lung Can­cer to tout an im­pres­sive 68% re­sponse rate for the 105 evalu­able RET fu­sion-pos­i­tive pa­tients in their lat­est study of this drug — which falls right in line with their ear­li­er re­sults. Their most re­cent cut of the da­ta avail­able from treat­ment-re­sis­tant pa­tients with an av­er­age of 3 pri­or lines of ther­a­py demon­strat­ed 20.3 months of me­di­an du­ra­tion with pro­gres­sion-free sur­vival of 18.4 months in the sin­gle-arm study — though that set of da­ta is still ma­tur­ing. 

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