Biotech Strategy Blog

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

Posts tagged ‘Translational Cancer Research’

Overcoming barriers to new cancer drug development

San Francisco – “Translational research is the key to successful drug development” according to William N. Hait MD, PhD, global therapeutic area head of oncology, Johnson & Johnson.

Hait presented a plenary session on “overcoming barriers to new drug development” at the recent AACR-NCI-EORTC Molecular Targets and Cancer Therapeutics International Conference in San Francisco.

How do we define translational research?

The definition Hait most likes is from Duke Ellington: “if it sounds good, it is good”

The challenge of drug development is that with rare exceptions the process is slow, inefficient and expensive.

Hait outlined several challenges to translational research, including:

  • Complexity – imagine blocking the traffic in mid-town manhattan. If you blocked one cross-town route, traffic would slow and then find another route.

This in my opinion is a good visual metaphor for the cross-talk that occurs in cancer. Block one target, and the cancer finds another route.  This highlights the need for combination therapy.

“rational combinations of targeted agents may require studying two or more unapproved agents” said Hait.

Novel-novel combinations are something that many companies are nervous about, but if there is a solid scientific rationale then this is something I think we will see more companies doing.

For further insight into how academia is facilitating this type of combination trials, I recommend Sally Church’s interview on Pharma Strategy Blog with Gordon Mills at ECCO/ESMO in Stockholm.

  • Inaccuracy of preclinical models – our models don’t always predict preclinically what activity a drug will have in the clinic.
  • Efficacy of Clinical Trial Recruitment  – need to have alignment of incentives. 20% of US patients are eligible for clinical trials, but only 3% participate.
  • Developing Biomarkers.  Difficult to obtain serial biopsies for oncology biomarker analysis.  Circulating tumor cells may be future, but current instruments can only capture and enumerate and offer limited characterization. According to Hait, the next–generation platform will be exciting.  It will allow third parties to offer additional functionality that can be integrated with the platform.
  • Drug resistance – a nemesis that just doesn’t want to go away.
  • Overcoming the Regulatory Environment – challenges include: scientific complexity, endpoint consistency, global harmonization, companion diagnostic tests, proper comparators, equipoise.

In spite of this complexity, Hait noted the FDA approved 34 new drugs in 2011. Several cancer drugs had a short time from submission to approval and met their PDUFA target date.  “These are incredible accomplishments,” he said.

  • Market Access – Hait asked the audience: “Would you buy a Porsche 911 that only works for 20% of the people, but we don’t know if you are one of the 20%?” Healthcare authorities need to decide cost/benefit of drugs, and regulatory approval does not automatically mean a new product will be reimbursed. There may be need for future trials with health comparators, or innovative agreements where the healthcare authority only pays for those patients who respond.
  • Workforce – academic physicians may end up being segmented into three groups: master clinicians, clinical investigators, physician-scientists. This may provide better career development than the current system.

Hait offered a few suggestions for improvement:

  • Move to phenotypic screening rather than target-based screening. In vivo shRNA screening was discussed.
  • Disease based drug discovery teams – the hope is that in-depth focused teams will predict better results.
  • More intense academic-industry collaboration with a focus on complementary expertise.

The limitation of this plenary presentation was that it only offered the perspective of one senior industry professional. I would have welcomed a balance of views on the barriers to new cancer drug development, and more focused take-home solutions.

If you want to hear more on this topic, AACR have a free podcast that you can download of an interview they did with Dr Hait at the Molecular Targets meeting.

1 Comment

Improving Cancer Clinical Trial Design #AACR Molecular Targets

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).

error: Content is protected !!