Biotech Strategy Blog

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

Posts tagged ‘niraparib’

Going beyond PARP inhibitors to improve cancer outcomes

DNA Damage Repair (DDR) has come a long way over the last decade or so from preclinical development through clinical trials, including some notable failures along the way. What began initially with PARP inhibitors, has now expanded into other related targets in the pathway, including ATM/ATR, WEE–1, Chk1/2, DNA-PK, and even Fanconi anemia genes such as FANCA/BC/D1, BRIP1 and PALB2, which are considered an indication of BRCAness where there is also chromosomal instability and homologous recombination.

Top 10 DDR targets and molecules at AACR19

At AACR last week, there was plenty to learn about in the ever-expanding DDR niche in terms of new data from a relatively new target such as DNA-PK to updated clinical data on WEE–1 and Chk1 inhibition to early data on PARP in a new tumour type to add to the growing list of ovarian, breast, and prostate cancers that are impacted by DDR therapies.

Included in this post are 10 key targets or molecules in the DDR niche that are of potential interest to readers – we explain why we included them and why the data matters.

Here we take a look at the highlights that we came across in this mini review, which should be useful preparation ahead of yet more clinical data likely being presented at ASCO and ESMO later this year.

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Sorting signals from the noise

The annual ASCO-SITC meeting (#ImmunoOnc19) was held in San Francisco this year and has come a long way from the inaugural event we attended in Orlando.

Finding the signals amongst the noise

In the original 2017 event, I vividly recall as stirring presentation from Dr Limo Chen on targeting CD38 in solid tumours, last year we wrote an update on GU cancers including the STING pathway.

What’s in store from San Francisco and how do we go about finding key signals from the noise?

Over the next two posts I’m going to focus on new findings in various approaches that either look interesting and worth watching, or where there are lessons that can be learned for future developments.

This time around, some of the highlights surprised even me…

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New developments in Prostate Cancer

At one point not too distant in the past, all the big news seemed to flow out of advanced prostate cancer with abiraterone and enzalutamide vying for attention, followed by occasional news on ARN–509, ODM–201, galeterone (remember that one from Tokai with all the AR-V7 kerfuffle?), radium Ra–223 dichloride, cabazitaxel, denosumab, ipilumumab, PROSTVAC, brachyury, and a few others. Predictably, not all were successful, and the count is still out on some.

San Francisco

In our latest conference coverage, we take a look at what we can learn from riding the prostate cancer train at ASCO GU ahead of the presentations in San Francisco tomorrow.

We will be updating this review as more data become available with the presentations, so do grab a cup of joe and settle down for some interesting reading ahead of time… this should get you all up to speed on the journey there!

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Why are the SOLO1 data so compelling?

Dr Moore at ESMO18

At the recent European Society of Medical Oncology (ESMO18) Congress in Munich, arguably the data of the meeting – if the audience reaction is anything to go by – were the results from the phase 3 SOLO1 trial that were presented by Dr Kathleen Moore (right).

The results were simultaneously published in The New England Journal of Medicine in an article entitled: “Maintenance Olaparib in Patients with Newly Diagnosed Advanced Ovarian Cancer” (Link).

As Moore and colleagues note in the abstract:

“After a median follow-up of 41 months, the risk of disease progression or death was 70% lower with olaparib than with placebo (Kaplan–Meier estimate of the rate of freedom from disease progression and from death at 3 years, 60% vs. 27%; hazard ratio for disease progression or death, 0.30; 95% confidence interval, 0.23 to 0.41; P < 0.001).”

Dr Moore is an Associate Professor of gynecologic oncology and the Jim and Christy Everest Endowed Chair in Cancer Research at the University of Oklahoma Stephenson Cancer Center.  She kindly spoke to BSB after her presentation in the Presidential Symposium.

In addition to Dr Moore’s personal commentary on what these results mean for women with ovarian cancer, we also have some additional insights on what this data may mean for other players in the PARP space such as Tesaro and Clovis.

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Picking PARP inhibitors apart

Picking a PARPi – what can the biology tell us?

One of the really interesting questions I recently received from a BSB subscriber related to PARP inhibitors – they asked whether the therapies are all the same and can be considered interchangeable as a class?

Around the same time, another reader wrote in asking if there was any new information on what’s happening with PARPi combinations in breast or ovarian cancers?

This got me thinking as there has actually been some useful preclinical and clinical studies reported on both fronts that at least begin to open our eyes to new information based on research that has been reported in several places.

Thus I thought it would be useful to summarise the data and take a look at what we learned in the process.

Fair warning – some of the findings turned out to be a little bit more surprising than you might normally expect to see…

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ESMO Preview 4 – Rock around the clock

Madrid city center

Greetings from Vienna, Austria!  Fresh off a red eye… we’re en route to one European cancer conference in Germany, while writing about another one in Madrid.

This latest preview looks at some of the key IO studies that are either intriguing or have potentially interesting results that BSB readers have written in asking us about.

There are some targeted therapies thrown in too for good measure too, as there are some IO-targeted combos to look at, as well as IO-IO approaches.

What I want to accomplish in this latest preview is point out some elements of what we call ‘interestingness’ where people should be watch or wary of either jumping to conclusions or making comparisons across trials and arriving at assumptions that may not turn out to be valid. My best advice here is to always be sceptical and assume there’s no concordance and that way you won’t be caught unawares.  It’s easier said than done, though.

Indeed there were so many questions about ESMO that we needed two preview posts to cover many of the questions we received.

Part 2 should roll out tomorrow, wifi on the road permitting – stay tuned for more on ESMO17.

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Going beyond PARP monotherapies

It amuses me to realise that I’ve been writing about and following PARP inhibition since 2006 or so, when the field was in that twilight zone of early drug development between preclinical and clinical, thus just beginning to hit some sort of consciousness and broader interest in cancer research.

The AACR Molecular Targets meeting in 2009 was the first scientific meeting I covered as a science writer on the old Pharma Strategy Blog, which focused on early drug development from preclinical to phase 2 – after that I would rapidly lose interest and move on to the next new shiny scientific lure to research and discuss. No doubt this eager new writer ran about like an overenthusiastic little puppy in the poster halls chatting to scientists about their research, much to the amusement of the more staid press room, who at that time probably never ventured out of the darkened basement gloom.

In one of the press briefings there, I met an engaging and thoughtful scientist who was presenting his poster on PARP and synthetic lethality. He kindly took the time to explain in plain English a commonsense analogy that was most helpful for grasping complex concepts. Having sat through several long talks from luminaries in the field such as Drs Hillary Calvert and Alan Ashworth that covered double strand breaks and DNA repair mechanisms, it was a most welcome respite in the hurly burly of the conference!

Imagine his imagery…

You have a four legged coffee table or wooden chair and one of the legs breaks off or is damaged. The table remains standing, albeit less stable than before. Now a second leg breaks, and inevitably, the table is so unstable that it falls over.

Once you grasp that simple analogy for synthetic lethality, you have the basic idea of DNA double strand breaks and how inefficient repair can lead to vulnerabilities in the tumour that can be exploited.

The scientist I spoke to in Boston back in 2009 was Dr Mark O’Connor.

He was involved in DNA damage response research at a little known private company in Cambridge, UK called KuDos, who were subsequently acquired by AstraZeneca. Nearly a decade on and Dr O’Connor is still at the company; he now heads up their DNA damage response area.

Dr Mark O’Connor, AZN

With olaparib (Lynparza) since approved by the FDA in ovarian cancer and slated for the ASCO 2017 plenary session for HER2- breast cancer, things have certainly changed a lot since those early heady days of KuDos and the R&D journey has not been without its notable ups and downs along the way.

In Chicago earlier this month, I had the pleasure of catching up again with Dr O’Connor to learn more about the journey, and importantly, where things are going next.  It’s quite an interesting roller coaster ride, to be sure!

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An in-depth look at OLYMPIAD in HER2 negative breast cancer

Often times when we see promising data presented at a cancer conference, we interview a thought leader and post the expert opinion with additional commentary and insights.

ASCO17 OlympiAD Plenary

At ASCO, we decided to take a different approach, a twist on the usual fare… given that two of the phase 3 trials, OLYMPIAD and APHINITY, received significant attention and focus involved breast cancer, we reached out to numerous experts and curated their sentiments on both studies.  For completeness and fair balance, these included industry and academic opinions.

Today, we begin with the OLYMPIAD trial presented by Dr Mark Robson on behalf of his colleagues exploring the role of the PARP inhibitor, olaparib (Lynparza), in HER2-negative metastatic breast cancer with germline BRCA mutations.

There’s a lot to consider here, not least is where do we go next from here and which PARP combination approaches are researchers most excited about?

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Going Beyond PARP in DNA Damage Repair

We now turn our sights to targeted therapies and DNA Damage Repair (DDR). This is an important topic that has seen much focus in ovarian cancer of late and will likely see renewed interest in breast cancer at the forthcoming ASCO meeting next month. As we segue from one set of conference coverage to the next, there is inevitably going to be overlap, which is a good thing here as it helps with background and preparation in getting up to speed.

There is no doubt that DDR has had a bit of chequered history over the last decade, whether it be the spectacular (and sadly predictable) flop of Sanofi’s iniparib in triple negative breast cancer (TNBC), the negative ODAC incurred by AstraZeneca’s olaparib in ovarian cancer, or AbbVie’s more recent veliparib failures, to the much more positive events such as three PARP drugs now approved in different lines of therapy in ovarian cancer (olaparib, rucaparib and niraparib).

If ever there was a niche for the roller coaster ride that is oncology R&D, it has to be PARP inhibitors.  There’s much more to DDR than just PARP though.

Indeed, there are multiple intriguing targets to explore and also the potential for combinations with cancer immunotherapy approaches that may yield encouraging results in the future.

Can we go beyond ovarian cancer into other tumour types and if so, which ones look encouraging and how woluld we go about exploring those idesa? What makes one approach more successful than another?

Here we explore the world of DDR through the lens one company’s approach and look at what they’ve done, where are they now and where they hope to be. It certainly makes for an intriguing and candid fireside chat.

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FDA Approval of Niraparib is a Failure for Precision Medicine

Following the recent approval of Clovis’s rucaparib (Rubraca) by FDA under priority review as monotherapy for the treatment of women with certain types of advanced ovarian cancer, then impressive SOLO-2 maintenance data after initial chemotherapy at SGO earlier this month, PARP inhibitors continue to be in the news.

There’s always more though!

This afternoon saw the approval of Tesaro’s PARP inhibitor niraparib (Zejula) by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for maintenance treatment of women with ovarian cancer who are in a complete or partial response to platinum-based chemotherapy (Link to label).

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