Biotech Strategy Blog

Commentary on Science, Innovation & New Products with a focus on Oncology, Hematology & Immunotherapy

Posts tagged ‘afatinib’

Important new oncology developments to watch out for

Whenever I think of ‘salad days’ – a Shakespearean expression referring to a youthful time, a period of carefree innocence and idealism – the idyllic Indian summer of 1976 comes to mind when the summer actually meant more than merely a few hours of sunshine for a couple of days in England, rather than days of rain and inclement weather cancelling much anticipated leisure events.

Of course, with warm lazy days one also remembers the opportunity for voracious reading, thinking, staring up watching the clouds while letting thoughts and ideas coalesce in the background.

Science is a bit like this too, coupled with great ideas coming out of asking pertinent big picture or provocative why and how questions.

There has been a crop of excellent research published this year including a nice batch of studies on a diverse range of cancer related topics, which may have important considerations for future pipeline development or novel combination studies.

Obviously one can’t write about them all, so we picked half a dozen to pique our readers interest…

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Spotting the wood from the trees

It’s time to turn our attention to the annual AACR-NCI-EORTC international conference on molecular targets and cancer therapeutics, often dubbed simply as TARGETS or TRIPLE for many industry observers.

Spotting the wood from the trees

With the ongoing pandemic, this year’s meeting remains a virtual one and runs from today through Sunday.

There’s quite a lot of intriguing abstracts to cover this year so we kick off our coverage with a look at KRAS combinations.

While the single agent activity of both sotorasib and adagrasib has been encouraging in lung cancer with G12C mutations, the rest test was always going to be what combinations will emerge as winners in terms of overcoming primary or acquired resistance (the mechanisms might be different in each case) in order to improve outcomes further.

Any agent targeting the MAPK pathway will necessarily be challenging in combination with KRAS inhibitors due to toxicities, but are there other approaches or could we finesse the dosing/schedules more optimally?

Here we look at two such combination strategies to see how they are faring…

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Insights on osimertinib in 1L NSCLC from the lens of the FLAURA trial

Barcelona – It seems only in only four years we have gone from discussing the phase 1 osimertinib data in EGFRm lung cancer with one Boston expert to reviewing the survival data from the phase 3 study with another expert from the same city… how time flies!

Today was a crazy day with multiple different embargoes lifting at different times so to make things simpler we carved out three different tracks to make it easier for readers to focus and follow the stories they are most interested in.

The KRASG12C clinical trial readouts continue apace with a look at the new non-lung cancer data. That post already went live at 1.30am ET if you’re looking for that evolving story.  The main highlights post with a daily running live blog and multiple updates throughout the day can be found here.

Meanwhile this particular post will contain everything related to osimertinib and the FLAURA trial, as well as where we are on uncovering resistance mechanisms. To get started we have a new press release to look at as well as some independent expert commentary to put the data in context.

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Update on resistance and transformation in lung cancer

Over the last decade we have seen some real progress with some subsets of lung cancer, particularly in EGFR mutated and ALK translocated tumours.  Indeed, an incredible amount of translational work has emanated from just a few groups based in Boston, New York and Hong Kong.

At AACR earlier this year, Dr Jeffrey Engelman (MGH, Boston) gave a fantastic talk not just about heterogeneity, resistance mechanisms, but also on how lung cancer can transform. Included in his review was the role of biospies and how he sees those evolving.

I’ve been meaning to write up this important talk since April, but decided to wait until the key publications that were in press at the time were actually published – it was a longer wait than expected!

In general, it is our policy to write up published, rather than unpublished data, out of respect to researchers.  It also makes it more useful to readers when the translational and clinical data is publicly available for those interested in reading the in-depth research articles.  We also gathered commentary from other though leaders in the lung cancer space for some additional insights.

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