CHICAGO--Eli Lilly ($LLY) wrestled its way into the spotlight at ASCO Saturday morning with evidence that its cancer drug ramucirumab delivers a marginal benefit for patients suffering from advanced non-small cell lung cancer. And analysts quickly heralded the data, saying it should help pave the way to quickly broaden the market for this drug.
In a study which enrolled 1,253 patients, those in the arm using ramucirumab combined with docetaxel lived an average of 10.5 months compared to 9.1 months for chemo only. That 6-week difference is small, but for this patient group even a marginal gain can be considered significant. And some analysts were clearly impressed by the expanded market this therapy can now exploit.
Ramucirumab was recently approved for gastric cancer and is now being sold as Cyramza. In the study, the drug triggered a 14% reduction in the risk of death, opening the way for its use as a second-line therapy, as noted by Adam Feuerstein at TheStreet.
ISI's Mark Schoenebaum was quick to seize on the fact that the drug did well for both squamous and non-squamous lung cancer patients, with the rate of bleeding in the lung only slightly higher in the drug arm.
"The latter two points are important b/c Avastin cannot be used in squamous patients and thus that part of the lung cancer market (perhaps 30% of patients) is relatively wide open and even a small benefit would likely lead to uptake among physicians and doctors," Schoenebaum wrote in quick response. "However, we still need to see the actual OS data in squamous patients as well as the rates of severe lung bleeding in squamous--we will very likely see this when the data are presented in detail on Monday at 4:12pm ET."
The recent approval of Cyramza was the first major regulatory OK that Eli Lilly has won in years. And it represents a key part of Lilly's claim that it has reformed its R&D arm, a group which has been afflicted by a string of nasty failures and bad decisionmaking.
"This is the first treatment in approximately a decade to improve the outcome of patients in the second-line setting," said Dr. Maurice Perol of France's Cancer Research Center of Lyon. "The survival improvement is significant because patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer typically have a very short survival time following second-line therapy."
- here's the report from TheStreet
- get the story from Reuters
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