Roche's Avastin Successor Flunks Key Study, Turns Hope to Tecentriq Instead

Roche's Avastin Successor Flunks Key Study, Turns Hope to Tecentriq Instead October 21, 2016
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff

BASEL, Switzerland – As Roche ’s blockbuster cancer drug Avastin faces looming competition from biosimilars, the Swiss company was hoping to find a worthy successor in Vanucizumab as a treatment of metastatic colorectal cancer. However, those hopes were dashed after the company said the drug failed to meet primary endpoints as a stand-alone treatment, Reuters reported this morning.

Vanucizumab, a monoclonal antibody, did not meet the primary endpoint progression-free survival compared to Avastin in a Phase II trial of patients with metastatic colorectal cancer. Dan O'Day, head of Roche's pharmaceuticals division, told Reuters the company “set the bar high” as far as its expectations of Vanucizumab as a stand-alone treatment. However, he said the company did not achieve that bar and as a result would focus on combined treatments with Vanucizumab and other drugs, such as the recently approved immunotherapy, Tecentriq, as opposed to pursuing its status as a stand-alone drug.

“But again I remind you that our Avastin strategy as we approach biosimilars was strengthened by the significant number of immunotherapy programs and targeted therapy programs we have with and without Avastin across the seven diseases in which Avastin is approved today, including things like lung cancer that we’ve already seen some good progress with Tecentriq,” O'Day said, according to Endpoints.

While the news was certainly disappointing for Roche and its Bay Area subsidiary, Genentech , the company has seen approval of several drugs in recent weeks, including Tecentriq for the treatment of people with a specific type of metastatic non-small cell lung cancer. Earlier this year Tecentriq was granted accelerated approval in the U.S. for the treatment of people with locally advanced or metastatic urothelial carcinoma. The FDA approval makes Tecentriq the first anti-PD-L1 immunotherapy for cancer, Roche said. Also this month Genentech’s prefilled syringe with Lucentis was approved by the FDA as a new method of administering the medicine to patients with wet age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and macular edema after retinal vein occlusion (RVO). Other drugs approved over the past year include Cotellic, Alecensa and Venclexta, which Endpoints said has given analysts “considerable confidence” in the near future of the company. Indeed, Bernstein analyst Tim Anderson told Reuters that the Vanucizumab setback was not critical as there were not high expectations of the drug, likely due to the high bar that Roche had set in the Phase II trial.

Roche has been developing a series of drugs as replacements for its blockbuster cancer treatments, Herceptin, Avastin and Rituxan. All three of the drugs are expected to lose patent protection by the end of the decade and are facing biosimilar competition. Reuters noted that Herceptin and Rituxan have follow-up drugs in Kadcyla and Gazyva, respectively. The failure of Vanucizumab leaves Avastin without that critical follow-up treatment, Reuters said.

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