A late stage trial pointed to AstraZeneca’s Tagrisso prolonging the lives of patients with a type of lung cancer.
Overall survival data showed a favorable trend for Tagrisso, although data were not complete at the time of this analysis. The trial will continue. The drug was previously approved for patients with certain types of non small cell lung cancer in combination with chemotherapy.
Tagrisso is AstraZeneca’s best selling drug with $5.4 billion in annual sales.
AstraZeneca has headquarters and logistics-packaging operations in northern Delaware.
Each year an estimated 2.4 million people are diagnosed with lung cancer globally with 80-85% of patients diagnosed with non small lung cell the most common form of lung cancer.
Suresh Ramalingam, MD, executive director of Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University, Atlanta and principal investigator in the trial, said: “These results represent a major advance for patients with Stage III EGFR-mutated lung cancer who have a high propensity for early progression and spread to the brain, and where no targeted therapy is available. LAURA shows osimertinib can provide impactful clinical benefit and could become the first targeted treatment option for patients with Stage III disease.”
Susan Galbraith, executive vice president, Oncology R&D at AstraZeneca, said: “These highly impactful results for the LAURA trial in this potentially curative early lung cancer setting further entrench Tagrisso as the backbone therapy for EGFR-mutated lung cancer. These data together with the ADAURA data, reinforce the imperative to diagnose and treat patients with lung cancer as early as possible.”
The safety and tolerability of Tagrisso in the LAURA trial was consistent with its established profile and no new safety concerns were reported with Tagrisso maintenance treatment following CRT.
The data will be presented at a forthcoming medical meeting and shared with global regulatory authorities.
Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death among both men and women, accounting for about one-fifth of all cancer deaths.