May 14, 2015
By Riley McDermid, BioSpace.com Breaking News Sr. Editor
A new study released today by AbbVie and Bristol-Myers Squibb Company shows that when their joint cancer drug elotuzumab is used in combination with Celgene Corporation ‘s Revlimid and the corticosteroid dexamethasone, remissions in patients with multiple myeloma were extended by five months on average.
Results showed that elotuzumab binds to “SLAMF7,” a protein in cancer and immune-system cells. Once bound, the drug is believed to trigger the body’s own immune cells to destroy the cancer cells.
The study results were released as an abstract of a Phase III study that will be presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in Chicago later this month.
The study followed 646 patients with recurrent multiple myeloma, and found that the ones who got the three-drug combination on average went 19.4 months before the cancer began to worsen. That was a major increase in time compared to the only 14.9 months for patients who received Revlimid and dexamethasone alone.
Analysts are also taking notice that after two years, elotuzumab reduced the risk of cancer progression and death by 30 percent.
The news is being heralded as groundbreaking because it will be the first antibody used against this type of cancer and has been shown to substantially lower the risk of death over the existing standard treatment.
“There clearly are very encouraging signs in terms of overall survival,” said Sagar Lonial, the study’s lead investigator from Emory University in Atlanta, told Reuters.
“In many ways it’s a double whammy in terms of the tumor itself. It was particularly striking that the difference ... seems to get bigger over time,” Lonial said, adding that this “really speaks to the power of this immune-based approach.”
As many as 26,850 new patients of multiple myeloma are expected to be diagnosed in the US in 2015, says the American Cancer Society, with 11,240 deaths in American patients. This type of blood cancer is tricky to treat because it often creates malignancies in the plasma cells, which accumulate in bone marrow and displace healthy blood cells.
“We hope that we will soon have a new treatment option for the management of these patients,” Lonial said.
If found to be effective in the long-term, AbbVie and BMY will be entering a crowded field cluttered with other competitive multiple myeloma treatments, including drugs made by Celgene Corp., Amgen Inc. and Novartis AG .
That heavy competition has been good news for patients with Alexander Lesokhin, a hematologic oncologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, telling the Wall Street Journal the new set of drugs have helped to “roughly double” the average patient survival to more than seven years post-diagnosis.
Will AbbVie, Genentech’s New Cancer Drug Be a Game Changer?
A promising new blood cancer therapy from AbbVie and Genentech that snagged headlines in early December for unexpectedly high rates of response in clinical trial patients has now been granted breakthrough status from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the companies said last week. The investigational drug, dubbed venetoclax, is an inhibitor of the B-cell lymphoma-2 (BCL-2) protein that is being developed by Abbvie in partnership with Genentech and Roche . BioSpace wants to know what you think this means for the broader market—and could venetoclax be a game changer?
