AstraZeneca and Daiichi Sankyo’s drug Datroway has helped breast cancer patients with a particularly hard to treat form of the disease live longer.
Datroway significantly improved survival and also delayed the progression of the disease compared with chemotherapy in patients with triple-negative breast cancer that had spread or couldn’t be operated on, Astra said Monday.
The patients were not eligible for immunotherapy, leaving them with few other treatment options.
Datroway is one of the medicines the U.K. drugmaker is counting on to reach $80 billion in annual revenue by the end of the decade.
Astra shares rose 1% in early London trading while Daiichi closed up 4.8% amid a wider market rally in Tokyo. The British drugmaker has gained 22% since the start of the year and its partner has declined about 10%.
Triple negative breast cancer can be hard to treat as it lacks targeted receptors like the hormone estrogen. It is usually more aggressive and can be more likely to recur than other breast cancers.
Datroway is the first drug to have improved overall survival more than chemotherapy for these patients, according to Astra.
Overall survival is the gold standard in cancer studies, where new medicines are often more likely to meet another goal in which they delay tumor growth.
Astra didn’t publish detailed trial results. The full data from the study will be shared at an upcoming medical meeting and with regulatory authorities, it said.
Datroway is approved in some countries to treat another type of breast cancer.
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