Summit Therapeutics crashes the ASCO party

As the big ASCO cancer conference kicks off today, Summit Therapeutics reported results via press release from a closely tracked study of its PD1-VEGF antibody ivonescimab. The drug delayed the progression of lung cancer in patients from the U.S. and other Western countries consistent with prior results reported from patients enrolled from China, achieving the goal of a Phase 3 clinical trial.

But ivonescimab has not yet demonstrated a survival benefit for any patients in the study, possibly delaying the company's ability to file for approval with the Food and Drug Administration and jeopardizing the drug's blockbuster potential.

My colleague Adam Feuerstein has more here.

nih

Brown cancer doc thinks NCI should get $50 billion, and he should lead it

Wafik El-Deiry, a Brown University cancer researcher and pandemic-era free speech advocate, is calling for a budget for the National Cancer Institute nearly seven times its current size. It's the kind of view that one would think would put him out of favor with the Trump administration, which has been slashing and burning medical funding.

And yet El-Deiry is reported to be under consideration to lead NCI.

In a new interview with Politico, he explains how his views still dovetail with the administration's. Earlier this month, he wrote an opinion piece in The Cancer Letter, arguing that two decades of federal underinvestment have left the U.S. trailing in cancer breakthroughs, even amid President Biden's old moonshot goals.

El-Deiry will be speaking in Chicago tomorrow at STAT's Future of Cancer Treatment event at the annual ASCO meeting. You can register here.

podcast

Moderna's vaccine hit, the MAHA report, and previewing ASCO

What does the MAHA Commission have planned for the drug industry? Why is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. targeting mRNA vaccines? And what are Adam and Elaine getting up to in Chicago? We discuss all that and more on this week's episode of "The Readout LOUD," STAT's biotech podcast.

ASCO kicks off its annual meeting this weekend. We discuss what to watch at the meeting. Then, STAT's infectious disease reporter, Helen Branswell, joins us to discuss RFK Jr.'s unprecedented move to strike Covid shot recommendations, and the cancellation of a nearly $600 million contract with Moderna to develop, test, and license vaccines for subtypes of flu. We also welcome chronic disease reporter Isa Cueto to discuss the key takeaways from a closely watched report from Kennedy's Make America Healthy Again Commission.

Listen here.

gene therapy

UniQure treatment reduces seizures in rare epilepsy

UniQure's investigational gene therapy AMT-260 sharply reduced seizure frequency in the first participant of its Phase 1/2a trial for drug-resistant mesial temporal lobe epilepsy. Over five months of follow-up, the patient went from roughly seven seizures per month before treatment to just two in total, with none reported in the final 60 days of the study.

Despite gene therapy sector's general nosedive of late, UniQure has done reasonably well. Late last year, the company's shares doubled on news that its Huntington's disease gene therapy could will receive accelerated approval. The treatment, which was designed to recode brain cells to alter faulty protein production, appeared to slow the progression of the neurodegenerative disease.

GENETICS

Illumina's PromoterAI unlocks rare disease clues in noncoding genome

Illumina has debuted PromoterAI, a deep neural network that pinpoints disease-causing variants in non-coding regions of the genome — segments long overlooked in rare disease diagnostics. The study behind PromoterAI was just published in Science, and notes that these stealth variants could explain up to 6% of genetic causes missed by exome sequencing.

The company is now offering PromoterAI through its DRAGEN sequencing analysis software, with data on all human promoter single-nucleotide variants freely available for academic and noncommercial research use, Illumina said in a statement.

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