May 13, 2015
By Riley McDermid, BioSpace.com Breaking News Sr. Editor
AstraZeneca PLC is doubling down on personalized healthcare, saying Wednesday that it has two new projects in the works that will focus on heart disease and respiratory illness, a departure from the area’s usual focus on cancer treatments.
The first of these will take place in partnership with The Montreal Heart Institute which will search the genomes of up to 80,000 patients for genes associated with cardiovascular diseases and diabetes. The second comes per a new deal with Abbott Laboratories for a diagnostic test to accompany an experimental asthma drug, in order to find patients who might benefit from AstraZeneca’s Phase III antibody drug tralokinumab.
The samples parsed by the MHI will include both tissue and blood samples which have been collected over a period of 12 years by AstraZeneca under informed consent from patients who have entered clinical trials to test cardiovascular or diabetes treatments.
Specialists in the field lauded the decision, saying the advances made in recent years make now an ideal window to start creating “companion diagnostics.”
“The time is now right to extend the personalized healthcare approach and the benefits it brings to all of our therapy areas,” Ruth March, who heads the initiative at AstraZeneca, told reporters. “Up to now the science of personalized healthcare has been slower to reach those common disease areas such as cardiovascular and respiratory disease.”
The two partnerships are only the latest of what has been a string of recent deals done by AstraZeneca to broaden its reach and pipeline assets.
White-hot venture capital and venture creation firm Flagship Ventures is having a stellar week, saying Tuesday it has formed three new strategic partnerships with AstraZeneca PLC (AZN), Nestlé Health Science and Bayer CropScience, as a raging biotech sector continues to roar. Flagship, which manages $1.4 billion in capital, is perhaps best known for the eight successful IPOs it HAS backed in the past two years, as well as the formation of 27 companies to date.
The new partnerships also include an investment in Flagship Ventures Fund V, a $537 million venture capital fund that closed in March 2015.
All three companies, AstraZeneca, Nestlé Health Science and Bayer CropScience, will get Flagship’s VC expertise—while Flagship will get a direct line to their product development and commercialization units, as well as a stake in each venture. Financial terms were not disclosed.
In early April, AstraZeneca PLC (AZN) announced it has an experimental lung cancer pill that has delayed progression of the disease by more than a year, the company said at the European Lung Cancer Congress 2015 in Geneva, Switzerland.
That data was culled from the firm’s Phase II study on around 300 patients, which showed a 54 percent overall response rate, which greatly exceeded its 9.6-month PFS rate AstraZeneca reported last fall.
The drug, AZD9291, zeroes in on a genetic mutation that keeps tumors resistant against other lung cancer therapies. The company said in its presentation today that it has been able to show AZD9291 produces a median progression-free survival 13.5 months, a huge boost for a patient population that typically sees much lower odds. It targets patients with advanced epidermal growth factor receptor mutation positive (EGFRm) non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), who also have the T790M resistance mutation.
“We are committed to developing novel medicines that address the significant unmet need in lung cancer by focusing on the genetic drivers underlying the disease,” said Antoine Yver, head of oncology, global medicines development at AstraZeneca, in a statement.
“Our extensive clinical research program is also investigating the potential of AZD9291 in earlier disease and in combination with other pipeline assets including immuno-oncology molecules,” he added. “With this comprehensive approach, our goal is to develop a broad range of potential treatment options for patients with EGFR mutation positive non-small cell lung cancer.”
The news could give it an edge when fighting off competition in the space, like Clovis Oncology ‘s CO-1686, which is in development now and targets the same mutation. The money at stake is not insignificant: AstraZeneca was forced to admit last year when repelling an acquisition effort by Pfizer Inc. that it expects AZD9291 to bring in $3 billion annually once it is approved.
AstraZeneca will submit the drug to regulators next quarter.
