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Posts tagged ‘AACR Molecular Targets Meeting’

Boston – At the AACR-EORTC-NCI Molecular Targets and Cancer Therapeutics conference, Susan Galbraith, M.D, Ph.D. Head of the Oncology Innovative Medicines Unit at AstraZeneca discussed the development of AZD9291, a potent and selective third-generation EGFR inhibitor of both activating and wild type T790M mutations in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).

Dr Galbraith reviewed the three abstracts presented at Molecular Targets and answered questions on the AZD9291 clinical data presented at ECCO 2013 in Amsterdam.

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San Francisco – the AACR-NCI-EORTC international conference on Molecular Targets and Cancer Therapeutics kicked off last Saturday with two educational sessions, including one that I attended on “Clinical Trial Paradigms in the Era of Novel Therapies.

The session had an impressive line-up of speakers:

  • New paradigms for early-phase trials (James Doroshaw)
  • Phasing out phase III trials: How much evidence do we need if the target is clearly hit? (Jaap Verweij)
  • Development of clinical trials incorporating genomic signatures: Lessons learned? (Lisa McShane)
  • Clinical trial designs for targeted therapies (John Crowley)

James H. Doroshow, deputy director for clinical and translational research at the National Cancer Institute, started his presentation by reviewing the causes of phase II trial failure:

  • 19% Safety
  • 51% Efficacy
  • 29% Strategic

He stated that the overall success rate of recent phase II trials was 18%.

As the debate continues about whether more cancer clinical trials should be done in Phase 2, the key issue according to Doroshow remains lack of a demonstrable proof of mechanism (POM) in many drug trials. That goes hand-in-hand with a lack of molecular markers which can be used to select trial subjects.

“Lack of molecular markers with proven clinical utility follows lack of clinically-demonstrable proof of mechanism”

He provocatively asked:

Should we perform early phase trials without generating evidence supporting POM patient by patient?

His view was that to obtain POM, you need to demonstrate drug action on intended tumor target early in development, prior to expectation of efficacy.

Jaap Verweij in his presentation used the examples of crizotinib, vismodegib, vemurafenib and imatinib in GIST as examples of drugs that had:

  • functionality for a target
  • aimed at a specific population
  • availability of a selection marker.

They are the poster children of targeted therapy, and he convincingly showed that the phase 1 trials of those compounds were largely predictive of the phase 3 results.

His conclusion was that phase I trial can be considered predictive of a phase III study so long as there is a large enough sample size.

We may need to look for bigger increments which should allow us to perform smaller trials,” he said. This would allow trials that are quicker and cheaper. However, he acknowledged that it was not likely we can completely eliminate phase 3 trials particularly for combination therapies or chemotherapies.

John Crowley reviewed the different phase III trial designs, including my least favorite, the “all comer” design.  The ridaforolimus sarcoma phase 3 trial presented at ASCO this year is a good example of how an “all comer” design yielded less than stellar results, and failed to identify the subset of sarcoma patients that optimally respond.  This is the type of phase 3 trial that runs the risk of failure if there are too many non-responders in the heterogeneous patient population.  This problem can often be avoided by more rigour in phase 2 trials to identify the optimal treatment period, relevant biomarkers and subsets of patients most likely to respond.

There is a lot of interest in how to design cancer clinical trials better, bring drugs to market more quickly and more efficiently.  While I enjoyed the content of this session, I did wonder whether it would have been better presented as a roundtable with more audience interaction and engagement rather than the perspective of a few.

A webcast of this session will be available on December 8 from the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR).

The recent AACR-NCI-EORTC Molecular Targets and Cancer Therapeutics international conference in San Francisco was an informative meeting.

What I particularly liked was the strategic overview that took place in many of the plenary sessions.

As an example, Johann de Bono, Professor of Experimental Cancer Medicine at The Institute of Cancer Research/The Royal Marsden in London highlighted the potential drug development targets based on prostate cancer biology:

  • Androgen Receptor (AR)
  • Heat Shock Proteins (Hsp)
  • Signaling: HER3, MET, IGF-1R, CCL2, IL-6, Src
  • PI3K/AKT/TOR signaling
  • PARP and BRCAness
  • Estrogen receptor (ER)
  • c-MYC & CHK1

His presentation discussed the possible therapeutic approaches, and complexity involved in developing novel targeted therapies for prostate cancer.

This is something that I expect we will hear more of at the AACR special conference on Advances in Prostate Cancer Research early next year.

In particular, de Bono discussed drug development strategies to target androgen receptor signaling, and some of the future challenges including:

  • Proving to the regulatory authorities that circulating tumor cell (CTC) count falls are a robust immediate endpoint of overall survival
  • Developing improved imaging for bone metastases

As a side note, there were several posters for cabozantinib (XL184) at the meeting (available on the Exelixis website), including preliminary research on computer-aided quantitative bone scan assessment.

However, as de Bono mentioned in his presentation, “diffusion weighted MRI shows hot spots not detected by bone scans.”

2010 and 2011 were good years for prostate cancer drugs, and with new approvals for MDV3100 and radium-223 (Alpharadin) expected, 2012 is set to be another “grand cru” year, to paraphase Bertrand Tombal.

If you were not able to make it to San Francisco for the Molecular Targets and Cancer Therapeutics conference, webcasts of many sessions will be available on the AACR site.

 

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