AstraZeneca PLC CEO Pascal Soriot set out his plans for a rich early pipeline of cancer medicines at an investor meeting on the sidelines of the European Society for Medical Oncology gathering in Madrid, as the company starts to pull ahead of the competition with 11 late-stage clinical trials ongoing in non-small cell lung cancer alone.
"We have made enormous progress with our pipeline," Soriot told the assembled group of equity analysts. "Of course, innovation comes with setbacks and the most recent one was Mystic, which didn't meet its progression-free survival endpoint." Still, the prospects for Imfinzi — the lung cancer treatment that failed to prolong life without the disease worsening in the Mystic trial — are far from being written off by analysts, who are awaiting data on overall survival, another primary endpoint of the study.
That data should come in the first half of next year, Sean Bohen, the company's chief medical officer and executive vice president of global medicines development, said at the meeting. "Our effort is really to move into earlier lines maybe with immuno-oncology, in part to increase the rate of cure," Bohen said.
AstraZeneca earlier at the ESMO congress unveiled data from the Pacific trial of Imfinzi, in which the experimental immunotherapy extended life by 11 months without the disease worsening, a measure known as progression-free survival. Another trial in lung cancer, dubbed Flaura, reported equally upbeat results showing that AstraZeneca's Tagrisso pill halved the risk of disease progression for those with EGFR-mutated lung cancer.
Analysts applauded the results, which were the key focus for many of the oncologists and researchers attending the ESMO meeting. Deutsche Bank's Richard Parkes called ESMO 2017 "a turning point for AstraZeneca" in light of the very impressive data from the Flaura and Pacific trials.
"These have been the highlight of the meeting and should secure the company's return to growth, driven by its new oncology portfolio," said Parkes, who rates the company a "buy." Parkes raised his sales expectations for Imfinzi to $2 billion by 2022 and said he does not expect there to be any competition from other PD-1 or PD-L1 medicines until 2020.
Flanked by Francophile advisers to his senior team — including Jean-Charles Soria, investigator for the Flaura trial and professor of medicine at the Institut Gustave Roussy, and chief Imfinzi investigator for the Pacific trial, David Planchard, an oncologist also from the Institut Gustave Roussy — Soriot said the introduction of Tagrisso into the Chinese market this summer had been very successful.
"We believe the potential for Tagrisso in Asia is very large," Soriot said. Some 40% of the Asian population have the EGFR-mutated version of non-small cell lung cancer, compared with 15% to 20% of the population in the U.S. and Europe. Tagrisso is now expected to be a new standard-of-care for first line therapy for the EGFR-mutated form of the disease.
"The Tagrisso data that the company has presented is really very strong," said Panmure Gordon's David Cox. "Since AZ's Mystic trial failure, Tagrisso will now be much more important to the company." Panmure has a 'buy' recommendation on AstraZeneca.