28th Dec 2020 08:05
(Alliance News) - AstraZeneca PLC said Monday its Lynparza cancer treatment has secured approval in Japan for the treatment of advanced ovarian, prostate and pancreatic cancers.
Astra jointly develops and commercialises the drug with US pharmaceutical company Merck & Co Inc. The pair signed a global strategic oncology collaboration to co-develop and co-commercialise Lynparza in July 2017.
The concurrent approvals by the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour & Welfare are based on positive results from the PAOLA-1, PROfound and POLO Phase III trials, which, Astra noted, were published in The New England Journal of Medicine.
Astra's Oncology Executive Vice President Dave Fredrickson said: "These three approvals allow patients in Japan to be treated with Lynparza, a targeted treatment personalised to their specific biomarkers. They further underline the critical importance of biomarker testing at diagnosis, which helps physicians determine a course of treatment tailored to individual patients to substantially delay disease progression."
Lynparza is a PARP inhibitor and which targets to block DNA damage response in cells or tumours harbouring a deficiency in homologous recombination repair, such as mutations in BRCA1 and BRCA2. BRCA1 and BRCA2 are human genes that produce proteins responsible for repairing damaged DNA.
MSD Research Laboratories Chief Medical Officer & Head of Global Clinical Development Roy Baynes said: "For patients in Japan diagnosed with each of these types of cancer there are very few treatment options. Approvals for treatments such as Lynparza, the first PARP inhibitor to be approved in these specific types of metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer and metastatic pancreatic cancer in Japan, enable us to advance this evolving era of personalised medicine and change how these cancers are treated."
By Paul McGowan; [email protected]
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