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Immunicum drug fails to significantly improve survival rates in kidney cancer

Adding Immunicum AB (publ)'s medicine ilixadencel to Pfizer Inc.'s Sutent did not significantly improve the 18-month survival rates of patients with kidney cancer, results from a phase 2 trial called MERECA showed.

Of the patients that received a combination of ilixadencel and Sutent, 63% were alive after an 18-month period, lower than the 66% of people that just received Sutent. Pfizer's medicine, also called sunitinib, is the current standard of care in metastatic renal cell carcinoma, or kidney cancer that has spread.

Median progression-free survival, a measure of how long a patient lived without their disease worsening, and time to progression were similar across both treatment arms. The company is yet to determine median overall survival rate of patients in the study given that over 60% of them are still alive.

Immunicum did note, however, that of the patients that received its drug, five witnessed complete disappearance of their tumor as compared to one patient in the Sutent-only arm. "If this response rate can be confirmed in a larger pivotal trial, it would represent a major step forward for the treatment of kidney cancer patients," Magnus Lindskog, an investigator in the MERECA trial, said in a statement.

Based on the results, Immunicum said it would continue the clinical development of ilixadencel in kidney cancer as well as other solid tumor indications. There are an estimated 273,000 new cases of kidney cancer diagnosed worldwide each year, representing about 2% of all cancers.