At a session of the American Association for Cancer Research Virtual Annual Meeting II, multiple FDA regulators gave presentations on various topics to help drug companies understand the ever-evolving oncology regulation.
Targeted therapy offers an opportunity for personalized medicine that's specific for a patient's tumor, but the hyper-focused treatment creates possibilities for cells to mutate and become resistant to the therapy.
Almost all solid tumors are treated with multiple drugs because the combinations have better efficacy than single-agent treatments. But finding those combinations can be difficult in an ever-growing sea of pair-wise combinations.
Bolstered by the success of CTLA4 and PD-(L)1 antibodies, companies are exploring new targets to encourage the immune system to attack tumors. "While these agents have demonstrated efficacy in a proportion of cancer patients, there clearly is room for improvement to lift the tail of the curve," Michele Teng, associate professor at the QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute, told the audience at the clinical trials plenary session of the American Association for Cancer Research Virtual Annual Meeting II, where researchers presented data from a pair of immunotherapies looking to build on the success targeting PD-(L)1.
The activity of many proteins is controlled through phosphorylation by kinases and dephosphorylation by phosphatases. Overactive kinases are one of the major drivers of tumors and, as a result, kinase inhibitors are a mainstay of oncology drug development. But “activation of the brakes, the phosphatases, could be equally therapeutically viable for the treatment of a broad range of cancers” to kinase inhibition, Goutham Narla told the audience at the 2020 American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) meeting.
CYBERSPACE – At a series of new drugs on the horizon sessions at the 2020 American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Virtual Annual Meeting I, a variety of companies presented preclinical and clinical data for promising early stage oncology products.
DUBLIN – Thrive Earlier Detection Corp. and its academic and clinical collaborators have provided a first glimpse at the utility of a liquid biopsy test as a screening tool for picking up cancers in an asymptomatic population. In an interim one-year readout of data from the prospective five-year DETECT-A study in 10,000 women, an early version of Thrive’s Cancerseek test picked up 26 cancers ahead of standard-of-care screening, while the latter modality picked up another 24 cancers that Cancerseek missed.
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