Roche Drug Beats Amgen, Bristol Rivals in Lung Cancer Study
(Bloomberg) — A Roche Holding AG drug billed as a potential blockbuster helped patients with a form of lung cancer that had spread live almost six months longer than two competitive medicines.
The experimental treatment, called divarasib, fared better than Amgen Inc.’s sotorasib and Bristol-Myers Squibb Co.’s adagrasib in a late-stage study. The drug was given to patients with non-small cell lung cancer that had spread, in part because of a genetic mutation, after other treatments, including chemotherapy.
The findings could help divarasib become the treatment of choice for this type of lung cancer, in which a mutation called KRAS G12C drives the tumor cell growth, said Jia Luo, a thoracic oncologist at the Boston-based Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, who was one of the trial investigators.
“It will replace the existing established KRAS G12C inhibitors,” Luo said in an interview.
The medicine could garner sales of just over 1 billion Swiss francs ($1.3 billion) in 2032, according to analysts surveyed by Bloomberg.
Shares of Roche opened up about 1.5% in early trading on Monday. The stock is up more than 20% since the start of the year.
The results, released Sunday at the European Society for Medical Oncology meeting in Madrid, are particularly convincing because Roche tested divarasib directly against the drugs it seeks to displace, rather than relying on an easier comparison such as chemotherapy, according to Luo.
“They actually took this risk and it’s paid off,” she said.
The drug’s safety was consistent with previous reports for divarasib and other medicines of the same class, the researchers found, with fewer patients experiencing serious side effects or quitting the trial because of them.
“These are practice-changing data,” Stefan Frings, Roche’s deputy chief medical officer, said in an interview. “There is a strong incentive to get a highly active life-prolonging therapy with a good safety profile to patients.”
Roche is also testing whether divarasib can play a role earlier in the disease. One study is pairing the drug with Merck & Co.’s Keytruda as a potential chemotherapy-free treatment for newly diagnosed patients, while another is testing it after surgery to keep the cancer from returning.
Based on the data, Barclays analyst James Gordon sees divarasib as likely to supersede the current treatments for this type of lung cancer. Still, Roche’s drug could face future competition from a medicine being developed by Eli Lilly & Co. he said.
(Updates with share, analyst reaction starting from paragraph six.)
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