Innovative treatment for gastric cancer approved in China

Innovative medicines for gastric cancer are bringing more hope to patients in China, which is home to more than one-third of global cases, medical experts said as the national government approved one more drug targeting patients in China with HER2 positive gastric cancer.

About 359,000 new cases of gastric cancer and 260,000 deaths were reported in China in 2022. Moreover, about 65 percent of patients presented with advanced disease at the time of diagnosis, missing the best time for surgery and resulting in a less than 10 percent 5-year survival rate for terminal patients.

Gene-targeted therapy is an important treatment for gastric patients to prolong survival and enhance treatment outcomes. Among them, gene HER2 is an important target, as one in five gastric cancers are HER2 positive.

"HER2-positive gastric cancer can be particularly aggressive and difficult to treat," said Dr Shen Lin, director of the department of gastrointestinal oncology of Peking University Cancer Hospital.

"Patients often face poor outcomes following disease progression on firstline treatment and subsequent chemotherapy. With the approval of the new drug, patients in China with HER2 positive gastric cancer are expected to have an important anti-HER2 treatment option that has demonstrated clinically meaningful efficacy following progression on previous therapies."

The drug trastuzumab deruxtecan, which was jointly developed by Daiichi Sankyo and AstraZeneca, has been granted conditional approval in China as a specifically engineered HER2-directed antibody drug.

The approval by China's National Medical Products Administration is based on results from a clinical trial, through which 28.8 percent of Chinese patients had objective responses and the progression-free survival rate was 5.7 months.

It is also supported by results from a trial published in The New England Journal of Medicine, which included patients from Japan and South Korea.