RESEARCH
Overcoming resistance and RevMed’s next drug?
In case you missed it, Revolution Medicines’ sessions yesterday were jam-packed with conference attendees. While most of the media coverage focused on the daraxonrasib in frontline pancreatic cancer data, the company also revealed some activity in a new compound, RM-055. CEO Mark Goldsmith described it as being part of a new class of “catalytic inhibitors,” since it can slice off a phosphate from GTP-RAS, or the “on” form of RAS, and turn the protein off.
This generated a lot of interest because one of the main ways that cancer develops resistance to RAS inhibitors is by amplifying mutant RAS, basically flooding the cell with the oncoprotein and overwhelming the inhibitor. RM-055, with its catalytic ability to turn multiple mutant RAS proteins off, may be the next step in the arms race against RAS-addicted cancer.
Read about it here.
pharma
How AstraZeneca thinks about the rise of Chinese biotech
STAT
The exponential growth of China’s biotech sector has swiftly reshaped the global race to find new cancer medicines, as Western drugmakers increasingly license potential treatments from Chinese firms or find themselves suddenly competing with the country’s fast-moving companies.
At AstraZeneca, a standard-bearer in cancer drug development, China’s evolution has only reinforced the importance of speed, said Susan Galbraith, the company’s head of oncology research.
“Every aspect of what we do, we have to look at it and say, how can we do it better, and how can we do it faster?” Galbraith said at STAT’s AACR event Tuesday evening.
That’s in part because the explosion of China’s biotech productivity all but guarantees immediate competition on any promising new idea in oncology. In response, AstraZeneca has shifted its pipeline to have “a greater mix of higher-risk, earlier-on” potential medicines, Galbraith said.
“It seems that everything that is physically possible to do is being done,” she said. “So there has to be thought behind the rationale of, OK, what are we going to choose to do?”
As for doing business in China, AstraZeneca has had scientists and dealmakers on the ground in Shanghai and Beijing for years. “It isn’t so very different from the Boston or San Francisco ecosystems, actually,” Galbraith said.
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