Amgen said Sunday that patients with advanced lung cancer who were given its drug to block a protein called KRAS lived for a median of six months without their tumors worsening. That’s a measure of response durability that experts say could be strong enough to secure the drug’s approval — if replicated in a larger clinical trial that will read out later this year.
But the Amgen drug, a pill called sotorasib (formerly known as AMG 510) showed partial tumor shrinkage in just over one-third of the lung cancer patients enrolled in the trial. That’s down from a 50% partial response rate reported last year in the same study.
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Pancreatic adenocarcinoma frequently has KRAS mutations, but I gather that they typically have a different mutation. It used to be thought that KRAS was “undruggable.” Maybe not. This sounds like a breakthrough.