Xconomy: In Turnaround Saga, Ignyta Nears Crucial Phase in Cancer Drug Trial
Summary
In its financial presentations, Ignyta also has highlighted that entrectinib crosses the blood-brain barrier, and was highly effective in treating one patient whose non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) had spread to the brain.A series of images of the patient, who was treated at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, shows a complete response of all brain metastases.If that turns out to be the case, targeting these five oncogenes could lead to unusually high response rates for patients with these specific gene fusions.Winning FDA approval for such a “molecular label” would be “unprecedented,” Lim said, explaining that “A molecular label spans all cancer tissues, so long as the appropriate genomic alteration is present.” Such an approach would require integrating entrectinib with Ignyta’s proprietary diagnostic technologies to ensure that only patients with particular oncogenes would get entrectinib—making Ignyta “the quintessential precision medicine company,” Lim said.Like Ignyta, Loxo’s lead drug candidate aims to block certain oncogenic targets associated with tropomyosin receptor kinases (TRK).