Penumbra Inc.’s 'resoundingly positive' results from its STORM-PE trial could see current guidelines for anticoagulant use in pulmonary embolism swept away in favor of mechanical thrombectomy. A deluge of favorable comments by experts and analysts followed the presentation during a late-breaking session at Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics, the annual scientific symposium of the Cardiovascular Research Foundation, which showed more than 50% improvement in treatment effect from Penumbra’s computer-assisted vacuum thrombectomy system plus anticoagulation compared to anticoagulation alone within two days with no increase in major adverse events.
Doctors and device makers are habituated to the notion that more devices equal better outcomes, but one presenter at this year’s Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics meeting in San Francisco argued that this is not always the case. James McCabe of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston said cardiologists may want to start thinking about whether a cardiology implant should stay implanted, a mindset that is anything but intuitively attractive to the modern practicing physician.
In San Francisco, the first day of Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics 2025 annual meeting offered presentations on the future of the convergence of devices, drugs and AI. The takeaway from the session seems to be that while the future is bright, it will become the present only when payers can find an economic argument to pay for the advances formed by this convergence.
During the first poster session of the 2025 AACR-NCI-EORTC International Conference on Molecular Targets and Cancer Therapeutics, held in Boston, several presentations highlighted novel strategies that move beyond traditional antibody-drug conjugate payloads and targets.
Convalife Pharmaceuticals Co. Ltd. has presented data for their bispecific antibody CVL-006, which targets both PD-1 and VEGF-A. CVL-006 blocks both the PD-1-driven immune pathway plus VEGF-A-driven angiogenesis, thus conferring a dual mechanism for superior antitumoral activity.
Cancer of the uterus is the most common gynecological malignancy in the U.S., with over 60,000 diagnoses per year, where incidence and mortality have increased through the years. About 30%-40% of patients with high-grade disease harbor mutations in the PPP2R1A gene, which encodes the primary subunit of protein phosphatase 2A, with hotspots being P179R and S256F.
At this year’s AACR-NCI-EORTC conference, several presentations brought to light new ways to tackle the treatment of genomically unstable cancers. Genomically unstable cancers can be treated by exploiting their repair dependencies, inducing catastrophic DNA damage, or harnessing immune responses to instability.
Preclinical results were recently presented from studies conducted by Fulcrum Therapeutics Inc. evaluating FTX-6274, a novel, orally bioavailable embryonic ectoderm development (EED) inhibitor that targets the PRC2 complex, in models of castration-resistant prostate cancer.
Mutant KRAS is a well-known oncogenic driver and has remained undruggable for many decades. The development of pan-KRAS inhibitors that target a broad range of mutations is a promising approach to cancer treatment.
At the ongoing AACR-NCI-EORTC International Conference on Molecular Targets and Cancer Therapeutics 2025 in Boston, Bridgebio Oncology Therapeutics Inc. (BBOT) presented data on BBO-11818, a potent and selective KRAS inhibitor with activity against several KRAS mutants both in active (ON) and inactive (OFF) forms.