As previously reported in At The Forefront on June 3, 2019
Treatment with the drug olaparib significantly reduced the risk of disease progression or death from metastatic pancreatic cancer, according to findings from the recently completed, international, phase-III POLO (Pancreas cancer OLaparib Ongoing) trial.
Olaparib (trade name LYNPARZA, jointly developed and commercialized by AstraZeneca and Merck) is a PARP inhibitor. It targets cancer cells that have a defect in DNA damage repair.
Progression-free survival, the primary endpoint in this study, was 7.4 months on the olaparib arm, and 3.8 months on the placebo arm. From 6 months onwards, more than twice the proportion of patients on the olaparib arm were progression-free.
“This is clearly a practice changing trial,” said cancer specialist Hedy Kindler, MD, lead author of the study and a professor of medicine at the University of Chicago. “It will change how we think about patients with metastatic pancreatic cancer and who should consider germline testing.”
This global study — to be featured at the Plenary Session at ASCO, the annual meeting of the American Society for Clinical Oncology in Chicago, and published online June 2 in the New England Journal of Medicine — is the first from a randomized trial to validate a targeted treatment in a biomarker-selected population of pancreatic cancer patients.
Pancreatic cancer tends to be “very resistant to treatment,” said Kindler. “There are few drug regimens with significant activity, and most clinical trials of new agents are unfortunately negative.”
“This is a devastating disease, with the briefest survival of any solid tumor,” Kindler said. Pancreatic cancer will soon become the second leading cause of cancer death in the United States.