By Christy Santhosh
(Reuters) – Summit Therapeutics shares dropped 14% on Monday following mixed results from a longer-term follow-up of North American and European patients in its late-stage lung cancer drug trial.
The study results, reported on Sunday, showed that the drug, ivonescimab, had stronger benefit in patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) in China, compared with patients in the other two regions.
While the study continues to read positively in aggregate, the details on the Asian vs. non-Asian subgroups were worse than expected, said Piper Sandler analyst Kelsey Goodwin.
Last year, Summit shares hit a record high after the company and its partner Akeso reported results from a trial conducted in China, which showed patients who took ivonescimab had better survival rates than those on Merck’s blockbuster Keytruda.
However, the company reported in May global data where the drug showed an overall survival benefit trend but failed to reach statistical significance, leading to a 30% drop in its shares.
Analysts have noted that the drug’s miss on overall survival could be a roadblock to potential approval in the United States.
“If you have immature, short follow-up in western patients, added to the much, much more mature data out of China, you dampen the effect short term. But that doesn’t mean that long term that’s going to be the case,” said Jack West, vice president of clinical development at Summit.
Summit plans to initiate more trials exploring the drug for lung cancer and other diseases. Ivonescimab has already been approved in China for NSCLC.
The therapy is an antibody designed to block a protein called PD-1, which helps the body’s immune system to fend off cancer. Keytruda also targets the same protein.
The drug developer’s stock is trading -37.29 times its forward 12-month earnings estimates, compared with -11.63 and -23.31 respectively for rivals CRISPR Therapeutics and BioNTech.
(Reporting by Christy Santhosh in Bengaluru; Editing by Maju Samuel)
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