It’s my pleasure to be at ASCO to present the results from our LIBRETTO-432 trial. This was an adjuvant clinical trial for patients with lung cancer, early-stage lung cancer, stage 1b to 3a, that had a RET fusion. This is a relatively rare mutation seen in about 1-2% of lung cancer, often in younger patients, non-smokers, however, even though it’s rare, identifying it is very important, mostly because we’ve found drugs, selpercatinib being an example, that are very effective, very high response rates, able to treat cancer in the brain and generally very well tolerated.

This was a trial to see whether using this drug after surgery or after radiation with an attempt for cure, whether using this drug after those potentially curative therapies could reduce the cancer recurrence rate. The patients were randomised 1:1 to get selpercatinib or placebo after having their surgery or radiation and chemotherapy if appropriate.

We found a major reduction in the cancer recurrence risk – an 83% reduction with a hazard ratio of 0.17. So this was very exciting, to me immediately practice changing, and I’m happy to be able to present these results.

What impact could these findings have in the clinic?

We have already used adjuvant targeted therapies, based on two prior trials – the ADAURA trial demonstrated that osimertinib for three years reduces cancer recurrence and improves overall survival; the ALINA trial used two years of alectinib. So now, following this paradigm, we now see that using a RET inhibitor can improve disease free survival, event free survival. I believe this is immediately practice changing. So on Monday in clinic I’m hoping that doctors, if they see a RET patient after surgery will consider selpercatinib.