Shat­ter­ing an old record, FDA quick­ly OKs pi­o­neer­ing, site-ag­nos­tic can­cer drug larotrec­tinib from Loxo and Bay­er

The FDA has hus­tled up a quick OK for larotrec­tinib, of­fer­ing their stamp of ap­proval for a site-ag­nos­tic can­cer drug from Loxo On­col­o­gy and their part­ners at Bay­er, a prime ex­am­ple of a new wave of on­col­o­gy drugs hit­ting the field.

The la­bel for their drug, now called Vi­t­rakvi, was the first thing to hit Twit­ter af­ter the mar­ket closed, which you can see here.

Stam­ford, CT-based Loxo $LOXO — run by CEO Josh Bilenker — is one of the trail­blaz­ers in per­son­al­ized can­cer ther­a­pies where pa­tients are grouped not by the site of tu­mor de­vel­op­ment but by ge­net­ics — an ap­proach that calls for broad­er se­quenc­ing to ID the ge­net­ic mu­ta­tions un­der­pin­ning each pa­tients’ can­cer. That re­quires lots of work to iden­ti­fy pa­tients. But they have da­ta from a small piv­otal study to back up their break­through.

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