Anticancer drug "Trojan horse" promising in many types of tumors

A new type of anti-cancer drug that acts as a "Trojan horse" to penetrate tumor cells has shown promise in patients with six different types of cancer.

In patients with advanced drug-resistant cancers, more than a quarter of cervical and bladder tumors and nearly 15% of ovarian and lung tumors responded to the new treatment.

The drug, called tisotumab vedotin (TV) and co-developed by Genmab and Seattle genetics, consists of a toxic drug attached to the tail of an antibody. The antibody is designed to look for a receptor called "tissue factor" – present at high concentrations on the surface of many cancer cells and badociated with poorer survival. Tissue factor binding attracts the drug to cancer cells, where it can kill them from within.

A team from the London Cancer Institute, and the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust led a global Phase I / II clinical trial of nearly 150 patients with different types of cancer who stopped responding to treatments clbadics.

The researchers found that a significant minority of cancer patients responded to the drug, with tumors decreasing or stopping growth.

They observed responses in 27% of patients with bladder cancer, 26.5% of cervical cancer, 14% of ovarian cancer, 13% of esophageal cancer, 13% of non-small cell lung cancer and 7% of endometrial cancer (but not in all the case). men with prostate cancer).

The responses lasted on average 5.7 months and reached 9.5 months in some patients.

The majority of patients at the beginning of the trial had advanced cancer that had already been treated and had become resistant to an average of three different types of treatment.

Biopsy samples taken at the beginning of the test are being badyzed to determine the expression of tissue factor on the tumor cells, to determine if it could be used as a marker to select the patients most likely to respond to the tumor. drug.

"What's so exciting about this treatment is that its mechanism of action is completely new.It acts as a Trojan horse to infiltrate into cancer cells and kill them." Inside, "said Professor Johann de Bono, Regius Professor of Cancer Research at the Institute for Cancer Research and consultant oncologist at the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust. "Our first study showed that it could potentially treat a large number of cancer types, especially those with very low survival rates."

Television is now being tested in other types of cancer, including cancers of the gut, pancreas, squamous cell lung, as well as in a phase II trial as a treatment second-line cancer of the cervix.

Genmab has had a series of successes in recent months. His latest Darzalex (daratumumab), developed in collaboration with Sanofi, was promising results in a phase 3 trial for the lucrative indication of multiple myeloma.