New drug advancements presented at ASCO

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Published: 21 Jul 2017
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Dr Christian Rolfo – Antwerp University, Belgium

Dr Rolfo talks with ecancer at the Best of ASCO 2017 meeting in Miami about new drug advancements that were presented at the ASCO annual meeting. He discusses the new NTRK inhibitor, larotrectinib, which is yielding a 76% response rate and a 12% complete response rate with patients.

He goes on to talk about new combinations on the horizon for immunotherapy and drugs for a variation of tumour types.

Dr Philip talked about new drugs that are in development for pancreatic cancer here.

I’m here in Miami to present some of the advances that we have in ASCO 2017 with the new drugs. Important to nominate especially a new NTRK inhibitor, that has shown an important response in patients independent of their age and their tumour type and the fusion [?? 0:20] of NTRK. That is larotrectinib and larotrectinib shows some response around 76% in older patients, including 12% of complete response in this kind of patient. So it’s a very important advance because we are not really aware about this new biomarker and it’s important to start to search in our patients. This drug is also in addition to other drugs that we have in the same tumour field, that is entrectinib that also shows an important activity not only in NTRK but also in ROS and ALK fusions.

This year was also presented a CAR-T drug with an important activity, also promising activity in some tumour types. Important to investigate also the bromodomain inhibitors that have an important activity, promising activity, in small cell intestine and also in oesophageal cancer.

Regarding the new combinations of immunotherapy, obviously immunotherapy is a fashionable topic and we have here new combinations coming with immunotherapy and with other drugs, for example we have [?? 1:30], CD3 T-cell agonist, monoclonal antibody, that is in combination with nivolumab and shows also interesting opportunities for patients with different tumour types.

Finally I would like to nominate a new drug that is very innovative in engineering that is a drug that is specifically working for synovial sarcoma patients and shows an important activity for this specific topic that we know that unfortunately we don’t have several treatment options for them.

It’s a very important congress, we will have several other news in ESMO and thank you.