Incyte Corporation reported promising early results for a cancer drug. Incyte is based near Wilmington. It developed a blood cancer drug Jakafi, which is now producing revenue for the company.
Results were announced at the the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting in Chicago. The company’s IDO1 inhibition may provide a new approach in enhancing the immune system in patients with a variety of solid tumors.
“IDO1 is an enzyme that works to restrain anti-tumor immunity. When IDO1 is activated in cancer patients with a number of tumor types, their prognosis is poor. A compound such as INCB024360, which can significantly inhibit IDO enzyme activity, may remove an important impediment to an anti-tumor immune response at doses that appear to be well-tolerated. IDO inhibition provides another immunotherapeutic approach that may lead to significant advances in the treatment of cancer patients,” stated presenting author Gregory Beatty, an assistant professor in the Department of Medicine, Hematology/Oncology Division, at the Abramson Cancer Center and the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
The most common grade adverse events were fatigue and gastrointestinal disturbances, and the most common grade 3 or 4 adverse events were abdominal pain, hypokalemia and fatigue.
“Results from this first Phase I study are encouraging. The compound was clearly well-tolerated and led to stable disease for greater than 8 weeks in approximately 30 percent of these highly refractory patients, half of whom had colorectal cancer, which has been refractory to most immune therapy approaches. Additionally, duration of therapy with INCB024360 exceeded duration seen with prior therapies, including two melanoma patients previously treated with ipilimumab. Together, these results suggest that INCB024360 has the potential to be effective as monotherapy but may be particularly useful in combination with other cancer agents since it was so well-tolerated,” stated Lance Leopold, M.D., vice president of Oncology Drug Development at Incyte.
