This has been a very exciting ASCO. We are going to talk briefly about some highlights in lung cancer, starting by last Friday, two days ago, we had the update of the CROWN study. It’s amazing because now we are talking about a study that is presenting the seven-year update in lung cancer, that’s unheard because I know that in breast cancer they present 20-year updates, 15. In lung cancer because we used to have a poor survival we only do one, two, three year updates. Anyway, lorlatinib, the drug from the CROWN study, after seven years we still have more than half of the patients without progression. So the progression free survival of this drug used to be five years minimum, now we’re reaching seven years minimum. That’s amazing because the previous standard of care we have a progression free survival of around three years. So now with this drug we are getting pretty much doubled progression free survival. That’s the reason since the drug reached the five-year mark we switched it to be the standard of care. So for ALK+ patients we know that lorlatinib is the standard of care and we didn’t have any doubt at five years, now at seven years you should use this drug. I understand that there are challenges with toxicity but the benefit to the patient is unheard of and to have a lung cancer patient seven years stable is amazing.
The other interesting presentation was sunvozertinib. Sunvozertinib is a drug for lung cancers with exon 20 genetic aberrations, mutations. The current standard of care for these patients is chemotherapy and amivantamab, so IV therapy, but now this drug is an oral TKI coming from China. We already knew about this drug because the FDA approved it last year in the United States but it’s not available because the drug is developed in China. Now still we don’t have it available here but, of course, everybody wants to move this drug from the second line that is FDA approval hopefully to the first line. It was very exciting on Friday to see how this drug maybe can be first-line used and the toxicity profile is tolerable. Hopefully it can replace chemotherapy as we do with other TKIs. So that was very exciting.
Today also we have a very important presentation, the COPERNICUS study. We had two posters, [??] of these two posters. Basically in COPERNICUS everybody knows amivantamab for EGFR+ lung cancer. The most difficult therapy of the amivantamab intravenous is the fact that it causes infusion reactions. But basically COPERNICUS is the amivantamab for EGFR+ lung cancer, similar to the [??] MARIPOSA study, but this time it’s subcue. It’s subcue and amivantamab subcue, in summary, is less rash, less paronychia, practically no infusion reactions. So we have two posters, one under the name of Dr Goldberg and one under [??]. Please review the posters because they can show that in the United States now amivantamab is approved subcue. You can see the toxicity is much better than the toxicity that was used for the last years when we were using the conventional amivantamab IV.
Finally, ten minutes ago they were presenting selpercatinib for RET+ patients, adjuvant therapy post-surgery. It has been exciting because in the standard of care for lung cancer we only have two TKIs that we use after surgery, one is EGFR, one is for ALK. Now, finally, we have a TKI for RET+ patients post-surgery showing a tremendous progression free survival benefit for our patients. So we are very happy because now patients have more options for their therapies.
