By Michael Erman
June 22 (Reuters) – Pfizer said on Monday that one of the key experimental drugs it picked up in its $43 billion 2023 acquisition of Seagen failed to improve survival when compared to chemotherapy in a late-stage trial of lung cancer patients who had already tried other treatments.
The drug, sigvotatug vedotin, did not show a statistically significant improvement in the study’s primary endpoint of overall survival in adults with locally advanced, unresectable or metastatic non-squamous non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) versus the chemotherapy docetaxel, Pfizer said. The company’s shares fell more than 1 percent in after-hours trading.
Pfizer said that it was still confident in the potential of the drug due to a stronger survival trend in the patients who had received only one prior course of treatment, as well as data from an early stage trial where the drug was used in combination with Merck’s Keytruda.
“In patients who had received only one prior line of therapy here, we did see very favorable trends in both progression-free survival and overall survival, suggesting that the drug is active and the payload is getting directly to the cancer cells,” Pfizer Chief Oncology Officer said in an interview.
The company already has an ongoing late-stage trial of the drug in combination with Keytruda as a first-line treatment. It also plans to explore using the drug with other experimental cancer treatments in its pipeline.
Sigvotatug vedotin targets a protein known as integrin beta‑6. In the trial, Pfizer said it found no clear relationship between tumors expressing the protein and patient response to the drug.
Pfizer bought Seagen and its portfolio of targeted cancer therapies called antibody-drug conjugates in hopes of offsetting the steep fall in sales of its COVID-19 portfolio and generic competition for some top-selling drugs.
The company is continuing to develop other ADCs, it said, including some that also target the same protein, IB6.
Pfizer shares have dropped more than 50% since early 2023 as the drugmaker has worked to develop new blockbuster drugs. It has said it expects to return to stronger growth in 2028.
(Additional reporting by Puyaan Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Vijay Kishore and Stephen Coates)
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