Pfizer Stock Climbs With Positive Renal Cancer Phase III Data
July 8, 2016
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
Pfizer , headquartered in New York, announced today that its Phase III clinical trial of SUTENT in the adjuvant setting for renal cell carcinoma (RCC) met its primary endpoint. The primary endpoint was to demonstrate an improvement in disease-free survival.
The S-TRAC trial, which stands for Sunitinib Trial in Adjuvant Renal Cancer, compared Sutent against a placebo in RCC patients at high risk for recurrence after surgery. The drug, sunitinib malate, is a multi-kinase inhibitor that can be taken orally. It was approved in the U.S. in 2006 to treat advanced RCC and is approved for use in 119 countries.
The trial looked at 670 patients at high risk of recurring RCC who had received the drug or a placebo for a full year. There were two cohorts, Global and China. The results of the study are from the Global cohort only. The adjuvant setting relates to being administered after initial therapy.
“SUTENT has long been a standard of care for the treatment of advanced RCC, and has reached more than 250,000 patients across diagnoses around the world since its initial approval 10 years ago,” said Mace Rothenberg, chief development officer, Oncology, with Pfizer Global Product Development, in a statement. “We believe the results from the S-TRAC trial support the potential for SUTENT to be a treatment option in a broader range of patients. We look forward to sharing the detailed results of S-TRAC with the oncology community and discussing these data with health authorities to determine an appropriate regulatory path forward.”
Full data from the study is expected to be presented at the ESMO 2016 Congress in Copenhagen October 7 through 11.
Pfizer stock is on the upswing, currently trading for $35.85. Shares traded for $28.56 on Feb. 8, rose to $35.31 on June 9, then dropped to $33.80 on June 27 before starting its most recent climb.
Company stock is about 6.05 percent higher today than it was a year ago, with a 52-week high of $36.46 on July 31, 2015 and a 52-week low of $28.25 on Feb. 8, 2016. Trading volume yesterday was 25,832,000, much higher than the average daily trading volume of 18,103,972.
Most recently, Pfizer made a “stalking horse” bid of $20 million for assets of Massachusetts-based Bind Therapeutics . The primary interest is Bind’s accurin technology. Accurins are programmable therapeutics, polymeric nanoparticles that can be “filled” with a drug and can remain in the bloodstream for a specific length of time.
Bind filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in May only a few weeks after cutting 40 percent of its workforce.