Pfizer is offering a glimmer of hope to lymphoma patients, announcing that one of its drugs, Adcetris, extended survival in patients with the most common type of lymphoma in a late-stage study. This strengthens, Pfizer says, efforts to expand the use of the treatment obtained through its $43 billion purchase of Seagen.
Last year the company pharmaceutical of New York has struck a deal to acquire Seagen and its targeted cancer therapies to strengthen its pipeline amid a sharp decline in COVID-19 product sales and generic competition for some top-selling drugs, reports Pratik Jain on Reuters.
The company, which holds the commercialization rights to Adcetris in the United States and Canada, had total revenue of $46 million last year.
Pfizer said Tuesday that it plans to discuss with regulators a request for approval to treat lymphoma patients. A potential green light for Adcetris for the most common type of lymphoma will pave the way for the drug’s eighth approval and strengthen an oncology portfolio that already has more than 25 approved therapies.
The combination therapy of Adcetris and two other drugs was statistically significant compared to a placebo in prolonging survival in patients with lymphoma known as diffuse large B-cell lymphoma.
The study tested 230 patients whose cancer does not express a protein known as CD30 and returns after a period of remission or does not respond to treatment.
The drug, when compared with a combination of two other drugs plus placebo, also showed improvements in both of the study’s secondary endpoints, progression-free survival, or the time before the disease began to worsen.