Merck & Co. has said many new products will be needed to absorb the coming financial impact when its blockbuster cancer medicine Keytruda loses patent protection. One, discovered by China-based Kelun-Biotech and licensed to Merck a few years ago, has now come to the forefront.
Dubbed sacituzumab tirumotecan, or sac-TMT, the therapy is part of a class of “antibody-drug conjugates” drugmakers see as potentially supplanting traditional chemotherapy in many cancers. Merck has been so encouraged by the clinical results it’s seen so far that it’s put the drug into a sprawling Phase 3 program consisting of 17 studies in a range of tumor types.
Sac-TMT “could be one of our cornerstone ADCs, and that's why you see our conviction in all of these trials,” said Shweta Jain, who oversees Merck’s oncology assets, in an interview with BioPharma Dive.
Fresh data being presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology conference have placed the drug firmly on investors’ radars. Abstracted study results ahead of the meeting showed that, after a median of 10.5 months of follow-up, a combination of sac-TMT and Keytruda cut the risk of disease progression or death by 65% compared to Keytruda alone in a Phase 3 trial in lung cancer in China. A “favorable trend” on survival has been observed, too, though it’s too early to tell the magnitude of the treatment’s benefit.
