Epizyme Shares Climb on New Data for Cancer Drug
Summary
First, nine out of 15 evaluable patients with advanced forms of Non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL)—very sick folks who have failed treatment with multiple therapies—have responded to Epizyme’s drug.And third, no major safety problems have cropped up so far, leading management to suggest on a conference call this morning that the drug could be combined with other therapies in future studies, and potentially taken chronically without causing severe side effects.Tazemetostat is a small molecule drug designed to switch off the activity of a specific enzyme—a type of histone methyltransferase called EZH2—that’s implicated in a variety of cancers.Chief development officer Peter Ho said on a conference call with analysts this morning that the company has been noticing a pattern of “gradual but prolonged reduction of tumor mass” across all the different subtypes of NHL for which tazemetostat has been tested.Epizyme should have another update coming shortly regarding its other drug, EPZ-5676: Celgene (NASDAQ: CELG) will decide whether to opt in to another year of a research collaboration between the two by July 8.
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