Asco 2022 – a novel target rounds out Daiichi’s triple

Did Daiichi Sankyo’s antibody-drug conjugates win Asco? Data on the Japanese group’s Her3-targeted patritumab deruxtecan served as a prelude to Enhertu’s practice-changing Destiny Breast04 result, widely acclaimed as the most important dataset of this year’s meeting. For an encore, Daiichi today presented the first human data on DS-6000, an ADC targeting CDH6, which could help validate this mechanism. CDH6, or human cadherin-6, is a protein thought to be overexpressed in ovarian and renal cell cancers. A phase 1 study yielded 20 evaluable patients at a February data cutoff, six of whom have developed partial remissions, Asco heard. Two are unconfirmed, however; of the four confirmed three were in platinum-resistant ovarian cancer. There were some dose-limiting toxicities, and one high-dose patient discontinued because of pneumonitis. Though retrospective analysis of patients’ CDH6 expression has yet to be performed, these early data give some hope in a highly refractory population for a new target that has no other clinical-stage assets in the competitor pipeline, according to Evaluate Pharma. Daiichi told Evaluate Vantage that DS-6000 was “one of our rising stars”, and said the approach differed from that taken by Novartis’s HKT288, an anti-CDH6 ADC scuppered by toxicity not long ago.