Survival benefit of adding Noxopharm’s Veyonda to Novartis’ LuPSMA confirmed in pre-clinical study

Pharma News: Australian clinical-stage drug development company Noxopharm announced two developments relating to the use of Veyonda to enhance the survival benefit of Novartis’ 177lutetium-PSMA-617 (LuPSMA) treatment in men with metastatic castrate-resistant prostate cancer.

The first of these developments is important pre-clinical evidence confirming the ability of Veyonda to enhance the cancer-killing effect of LuPSMA treatment. The study was conducted by a research group led
by Professor Kristofer Thurecht at The University of Queensland and had the aim of separating a combination effect (Veyonda + LuPSMA) from that of either drug alone.

Professor Kristofer Thurecht, University of Queensland, said “The combination of Veyonda with LuPSMA exhibited an impressive synergistic therapeutic response, with sustained and almost complete regression
of the tumour and minimally-observed systemic toxicity. This combined response was not observed in any of the animals treated with monotherapy.”

The second development is the publication of the LuPIN phase I/II clinical trial data in the highly respected The Journal of Nuclear Medicine.

The data is the more detailed version of a presentation in February 2021 to the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) GU meeting and reported to the ASX on 15 February 2021. The final tumour response data for this phase I/II study in 56 men is: 86% had a reduction in PSA levels; 61% had a PSA reduction 50%; median PSA progression-free survival was 7.5 months; median overall survival was 19.7 months.

Noxopharm CEO, Graham Kelly, said “Men with prostate cancer that has spread and stopped responding to all available therapies have very limited survival prospects, generally in the order of 5-8 months. Which is why a median overall survival outcome of 19.7 months in the LuPIN trial was so impressive. Based on the published survival experience of LuPSMA therapy alone, we were in little doubt that Veyonda had played a major role in that outcome. However, for some, the question of a combination effect versus a LuPSMA therapy alone effect remained, a question we are confident now has gone a long way to being answered by the animal study. In that study, LuPSMA on its own had an impressive anticancer effect, but nothing like the effect when Veyonda was added and the tumours mostly disappeared.

“We see Veyonda having a major commercial future in the rapidly growing field of radioligand therapy, not just in prostate cancer, but across the broad cancer spectrum. With a wide and growing number of companies developing novel radioligand drugs, this is a commercial opportunity that the Company is able to carve out as a separate market segment while it undertakes the other 3 programs – IONIC, DARRT and CEP – in its 4-pillars strategy,” he added.