AstraZeneca's Experimental Gastric Cancer Drug 'Sun-V' Shows Promising Results - Sarmad

Data from a late-stage clinical trial showed that AstraZeneca’s experimental drug “Sun-VE” helped patients with advanced-stage stomach cancer live longer than analysts had predicted, after they had received at least two prior treatments.

Patients who received the drug, which consists of an antibody combined with a chemotherapy dose, lived for 10 months, compared to five months for those receiving physician-selected chemotherapy, representing a 53 percent reduction in the risk of death.

Susan Galbraith, Executive Vice President of Research and Development in Oncology and Hematology at AstraZeneca, said, “The five-month increase in survival is of significant clinical importance in a group of patients who are difficult to treat.”

This success may bolster confidence in the drug’s commercial potential, although it did not achieve statistical significance for the study’s other endpoint, progression-free survival. AstraZeneca said it expects the drug to generate peak sales of $3 billion to $5 billion, but analyst estimates are closer to $1 billion.

The drug, sonesatog vedotin, or Sun-VE, belongs to a class of treatments known as antibody-drug conjugates, often described as “guided missiles” because they deliver treatment to cancer cells while sparing healthy cells.

Galbraith said, “This is another data set that reinforces our long-held view that antibody-drug conjugates can replace and improve upon standard chemotherapy in a number of different tumor types.”

Analysts expect the hazard ratio for death to be around 0.7 or lower, with an increase in life expectancy of at least two months.

Detailed data from the study, which included 532 patients, were presented today at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Congress in Madrid, a month after AstraZeneca agreed to invest $2 billion in biopharmaceutical company Sumitomo Pharma and to test Sun-VE in combination with Sumitomo’s bispecific antibody, evobrutinib.

Patients with esophageal and stomach cancer were included in AstraZeneca’s study, with at least 25 percent of their tumor cells expressing the protein Claudin 18.2, a protein found in many cancer cells.

Galbraith said the threshold could double the number of patients eligible for treatment.

She told Reuters in an interview, “I think this is promising for the opportunity to use it earlier in the treatment pathway.”

Another study involving more than 2,000 patients is already testing the drug in the early stages of patient treatment.

Despite the overall increase in survival rates, progression-free survival, one of the key endpoints, did not reach statistical significance, with a median duration of 4.2 months for the drug and 3.8 months for chemotherapy.