In our ECCO Preview series last year (note: ESMO and ECCO have alternated the EU major cancer conference in the Fall for years), we highlighted several promising novel agents in development including the following:

  • StemCentRx’s anti-DLL3 inhibitor: rovalpituzumab tesirine (ROVA-T)
  • Ignyta’s Pan Trk, ROS1 and ALK inhibitor: entrectinib
  • Pfizer’s anti-NOTCH3 inhibitor: PF–06650808
  • Pfizer’s PTK7 ADC in TNBC: PF–06647020

What happened to them all? Were they good selections or not?

Well, AbbVie acquired StemCentRx in a $10.2B deal, Ignyta are busy advertising their new clinical trial enrollment for entrectinib as a non-chemotherapy and non-placebo controlled study on social media, suggesting that compound’s clinical development is still very much alive, while both the Pfizer compounds are also still active, as far as I know.

None have yet been consigned to dog drug heaven, which is quite something considering the failure rate in oncology drug pipelines!

Indeed, last year the Pfizer PTK7 ADC data was focused on triple negative breast cancer, where there is a solid rationale. This time around, the same research group explore the latest activity in advanced solid tumours, including ovarian cancer, as mentioned in the earlier Preview (See: 9 key abstracts in Ovarian Cancer).

sallys-barSo it’s time to sit down and chew the fat on one of my favourite topics at conferences – Development Therapeutics.

Here we consider which other compounds – other than the Pfizer ADC – that are worthy of highlighting and watching out for this year?

There are certainly some curious and quite different (i.e. novel) approaches to look at.

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