Late-stage blow to AstraZeneca’s prostate cancer drug
pharmafile | February 7, 2011 | News story | Research and Development | AstraZeneca, Cancer, prostate cancer, zibotentan
A late-stage trial of AstraZeneca’s oral prostate cancer drug zibotentan has been halted after it failed to meet its primary endpoints.
Zibotentan was being tested in a phase III trial as a monotherapy in patients with non-metastatic castrate resistant prostate cancer (CRPC).
Study 15 was stopped early after a review by the Independent Data Monitoring Committee indicated that zibotentan as a monotherapy was unlikely to meet its primary endpoints of increasing both progression-free survival and overall survival.
The discontinuation of Study 15 concludes the zibotentan monotherapy programme in CRPC with full data from the trial to be published later this year.
AstraZeneca said it had taken an early view on the progress of Study 15 following poor results from its ENTHUSE Study 14 trial released in September.
A separate phase III trial, Study 33, will evaluate zibotentan plus chemotherapy against chemotherapy alone in men whose disease has metastasised.
This trial is set to continue with full results expected in the second half of this year.
Current treatments for prostate cancer include AstraZeneca’s own Zoladex (goserelin), an injectable treatment for CRPC that restricts levels of testosterone.
Also on the market is Dendreon’s prostate cancer treatment Provenge, a therapeutic vaccine that stimulates the body’s immune system to ‘attack’ cancer cells and which won US regulatory approval in May.
Zibotentan is designed to help patients who no longer respond to treatments that block the action of testosterone, a hormone driving cancer growth and the standard mechanism of action for current treatments.
Instead it works by blocking the endothelin pathway, which drives the spread of cancer growth, and by blocking the receptor in this pathway AstraZeneca hopes to show zibotentan can slow both tumour growth and the spread of cancer cells.
Ben Adams
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