In this articlePFEFollow your favorite stocksCREATE FREE ACCOUNTCFOTO | Future Publishing | Getty ImagesCHICAGO — Pfizer on Friday said its drug for an advanced form of lung cancer showed promising long-term results in a late-stage trial, which may help establish it as the new standard treatment for the condition.The company’s medicine helped patients live longer without seeing their cancer progress, and most people experienced that benefit for over five years. The drug, called Lorbrena, also cut the risk of the cancer progressing in patients’ brains.Lorbrena is already approved in the U.S. for treating adults with advanced non-small cell lung cancer who have a mutation in a gene called ALK. Only about 5% of all non-small cell lung cancer patients have the mutation, which causes cancer cells to grow and spread abnormally. But that translates to 72,000 people who are diagnosed with that specific form of lung cancer each year worldwide, according to a release from Pfizer. That cancer is typically aggressive and often affects younger people, the company added.More broadly, non-small-cell lung cancer is a common form of the disease.Lorbrena is specifically approved as a first-line treatment for that form of lung cancer, meaning patients who take it have not received any other therapy. But Pfizer’s drug isn’t currently considered the standard – or the most appropriate and widely used – treatment for the condition. The company thinks the new five-year data on the drug will change that. “In cancer medicine in general, you always want to give the best medicine upfront first. So that’s why we believe this data … will lead to [Lorbrena] becoming a standard” first-line treatment in this specific form of lung cancer, Chris Boshoff, Pfizer’s chief oncology officer, told CNBC in an interview. The new five-year data is from the same phase three trial that led to Lorbrena’s U.S. approval. Pfizer will present the results on Friday at the American Society of Clinical Oncology annual meeting in Chicago, the largest cancer research conference in the world. The data was also published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.Nearly 300 people in the trial either received Lorbrena or Pfizer’s older lung cancer drug Xalkori. At the five-year mark, 50% of patients in the trial were still receiving Lorbrena compared to 5% of people receiving Xalkori.In the trial, Lorbrena cut the risk of cancer progression or death by 81% compared to Xalkori, after five years. Around 60% of patients treated with Lorbrena were alive without seeing their cancer progress after that same period. That compares to 8% among those who took Xalkori. Dr. David Spigel, chief scientific officer at the Sarah Cannon Research Institute, called those results “the best we’ve ever seen” during a briefing with reporters ahead of the ASCO conference.”We have not seen anything close to this. Other great drugs that are available … have not reported the kind of durable, progression-free survival events of this magnitude,” Spigel said, referring to the rate of people who remained alive without seeing their cancer progress. He noted that there are no head-to-head trials that compare Pfizer’s Lorbrena with competing lung cancer drugs, including one called alectinib and another called brigatinib.All three are called ALK inhibitors, which are designed to block the mutations in the ALK gene associated with abnormal cancer cell growth. Lorbrena is considered a newer, third-generation ALK inhibitor, while the two competitors are second-genera …
Article Attribution | Read More at Article Source
[mwai_chat context=”Let’s have a discussion about this article:nnIn this articlePFEFollow your favorite stocksCREATE FREE ACCOUNTCFOTO | Future Publishing | Getty ImagesCHICAGO — Pfizer on Friday said its drug for an advanced form of lung cancer showed promising long-term results in a late-stage trial, which may help establish it as the new standard treatment for the condition.The company’s medicine helped patients live longer without seeing their cancer progress, and most people experienced that benefit for over five years. The drug, called Lorbrena, also cut the risk of the cancer progressing in patients’ brains.Lorbrena is already approved in the U.S. for treating adults with advanced non-small cell lung cancer who have a mutation in a gene called ALK. Only about 5% of all non-small cell lung cancer patients have the mutation, which causes cancer cells to grow and spread abnormally. But that translates to 72,000 people who are diagnosed with that specific form of lung cancer each year worldwide, according to a release from Pfizer. That cancer is typically aggressive and often affects younger people, the company added.More broadly, non-small-cell lung cancer is a common form of the disease.Lorbrena is specifically approved as a first-line treatment for that form of lung cancer, meaning patients who take it have not received any other therapy. But Pfizer’s drug isn’t currently considered the standard – or the most appropriate and widely used – treatment for the condition. The company thinks the new five-year data on the drug will change that. “In cancer medicine in general, you always want to give the best medicine upfront first. So that’s why we believe this data … will lead to [Lorbrena] becoming a standard” first-line treatment in this specific form of lung cancer, Chris Boshoff, Pfizer’s chief oncology officer, told CNBC in an interview. The new five-year data is from the same phase three trial that led to Lorbrena’s U.S. approval. Pfizer will present the results on Friday at the American Society of Clinical Oncology annual meeting in Chicago, the largest cancer research conference in the world. The data was also published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.Nearly 300 people in the trial either received Lorbrena or Pfizer’s older lung cancer drug Xalkori. At the five-year mark, 50% of patients in the trial were still receiving Lorbrena compared to 5% of people receiving Xalkori.In the trial, Lorbrena cut the risk of cancer progression or death by 81% compared to Xalkori, after five years. Around 60% of patients treated with Lorbrena were alive without seeing their cancer progress after that same period. That compares to 8% among those who took Xalkori. Dr. David Spigel, chief scientific officer at the Sarah Cannon Research Institute, called those results “the best we’ve ever seen” during a briefing with reporters ahead of the ASCO conference.”We have not seen anything close to this. Other great drugs that are available … have not reported the kind of durable, progression-free survival events of this magnitude,” Spigel said, referring to the rate of people who remained alive without seeing their cancer progress. He noted that there are no head-to-head trials that compare Pfizer’s Lorbrena with competing lung cancer drugs, including one called alectinib and another called brigatinib.All three are called ALK inhibitors, which are designed to block the mutations in the ALK gene associated with abnormal cancer cell growth. Lorbrena is considered a newer, third-generation ALK inhibitor, while the two competitors are second-genera …nnDiscussion:nn” ai_name=”RocketNews AI: ” start_sentence=”Can I tell you more about this article?” text_input_placeholder=”Type ‘Yes'”]
