Niels Weinstedt | Getty Images
Johnson & Johnson Tuesday Says its lung cancer treatment plan can help people live at least one year longer AstraZenecaTagrisso is the drug of choice for treating certain types of lung cancer.
Johnson & Johnson said in a statement that its drugs Rybrevant and Lazcluze showed statistically significant and clinically meaningful improvements in survival relative to Tagrisso in a pivotal trial. Johnson & Johnson executives said in interviews that the company expects to benefit from the disease for at least a year, and possibly longer. The company plans to present full results at a medical conference later this year.
“This is definitely a igniter,” said Biljana Naumovic, president of U.S. Solid Tumor Oncology at Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicines. “People are looking for overall survival differences.”
J&J is trying to unseat AstraZeneca’s blockbuster Tagrisso, a once-daily pill that transformed treatment of EGFR-mutant non-small cell lung cancer and extended median survival to about three years. These genetic errors cause cancer cells to grow. They are responsible for 10 to 15 percent of lung cancer cases in the United States, according to the American Cancer Society American Lung Association.
Johnson & Johnson executives hailed the results as a game changer that should change how this type of lung cancer is treated. But there’s no guarantee that doctors and patients will switch to Rybrevant and Lazcluze because the treatments have more side effects and require infusions every few weeks, said Dr. Stephen Liu, chief of thoracic oncology and head of developmental therapeutics at Georgetown University Lombardi Comprehensive Center. .
“I think announcing that this will cause people to live longer will force us to look at this issue more seriously,” Liu said.
He wanted to see who benefited the most so he could treat those patients more aggressively while avoiding those who were less likely to respond. Rybrevant and Lazcluze can cause people to develop rashes and cause split nails.
Like Tagrisso, Johnson & Johnson’s treatment blocks the EGFR protein to prevent cancer cells from growing. It also targets MET, a common pathway used by cancer to develop drug resistance.
Johnson & Johnson predicts annual sales of Rybrevant and Lazcluze could top $5 billion. Tagrisso will bring AstraZeneca approximately $6 billion in revenue in 2023.
About The Author
